PHILOSOPHY – That what it is

Thought is Matter and Matter is Materialistic therefore thought is materialistic. Thought is one and the only instrument you have that you can deal with any thing when that which is materialistic how can you deal with spirituality which is non materialistic, therefore spirituality is absurd that for centuries together they have fooled themselves and fooled us.

Thought is an interloper, which thrusts itself into the affairs of the senses, it has a profit motive , thought directs the activity of the senses to get something out of them , and uses them to give continuity to itself. The heritage, the culture input that is what is About Thought within which you are incarcerated that you have no freedom from is the whole problem

The natural state is not a THOUGHTLESS STATE–that is one of the greatest hoaxes perpetrated for thousands of years on poor, helpless hindus. You will never be without Thought until the body is corpse, a very dead corpse. Being able to think is necessary to survive . But in this state Thought stops choking u, it may be falling into it’s natural rhythm. There is no longer a YOU who reads the thoughts and thinks that they are his.

What is keeping you from being in your natural state? You are constantly moving away from yourself. You want to be happy, either permanently or at least for this moment. You are dissatisfied with ur everyday experiences, and so you want some new ones. you want to perfect yourself ,to change yourself. You are reaching out, trying to be other than what you are. It is this that is taking you away from yourself.

Cause and effect are not two different things, they are one. It is the mind that separates the two. Why has this become problem to you? you are in no position to deny or accept what I am saying. you probably tried some kind of system to control your thoughts and beliefs, and it has failed u. Repeating mantras, doing yoga and prayer have not helped. For whatever reasons, you have not been able to control thoughts That’s all.

When you know nothing, you say a lot. When you know something, there is nothing to say.

You can commit the seven deadly sins and still be able to come into the natural state.

There is a necklace around your neck and u are searching fr it everywhere. It is there, your natural state, it has been there all the time. When all movement away from it stops, you will discover that it is there.

Consciousness is limitless. You have superimposed on this limitless consciousness your individual consciousness and that is the thinking structure. When this thinking structure is not there, what is there is pure consciousness,life,truth, reality, call it by whatever name.

It is the search that is creating the disturbance, the division in ur state of consciousness. That is violence. Your holy thoughts are same as the thoughts of a fascist dictator.

To become somebody else u need time, to be yourself it doesn’t need time

You are unique. You are far ahead of the Buddha,Jesus and all these religious teachers put together. But this uniqueness cannot express itself unless the limitations are destroyed.

The very enquiry creates duality and u feed this duality by further enquiry and thereby seek your continuity. So u are interested only in your continuity.

There is already a monkey on your back, and now wanting to learn a new trick, you are putting a gorilla on your back.

Sri Ramana Maharishi and Sri Ramakrishna died of cancer. This body is subject to the natural laws. There is a constant battle going on between this organism and the bacteria there. How long we have the resistance, one doesn’t know. This is not pessimism. If u leave it to the intelligence of the body, perhaps it will heal itself, or you will go gracefully.

In nature there is no death or destruction at all. What occurs is the reshuffling of atoms. If there is a need or necessity to maintain the balance of ENERGY in this Universe, death occurs.

To be an individual and to be yourself, you do not have to do a thing. Culture demands that you should be something other than what you are. What a tremendous amount of energy we waste trying to become that! But if that energy is released, living becomes very simple. Then what is it that you cannot do?

The society is interested in continuity and it does not want to change unless it is pushed by circumstances. So you move like crabs , dig a hole there until you are pushed out by circumstances. Basically you don’t want to change. There is nothing there but ideas, dead things passed on from generation to generation, that is the momentum of thought, the continuity. It is simple but you are making it difficult by your refusal to change.

We have not become human , we are still like animals. And since we do not accept the fact that we are like animals, we are moving away from that state all the time , because we want to be angels, divine — but angels don’t exist except as an idea , a myth. In spite of all your struggles, all this centuries- old civilization and culture, you haven’t gone one step further.

Why do you want to meditate? because somebody tells you that you should meditate. So you sit there and meditate. What happens? Thoughts move in all directions , so you bring it back to one particular point , and this is what u call concentration. And then it begins to move again, you bring it back it moves again because that is its nature.

So this constant attempt on your part to hold the thing that you cannot hold tires you and that tiredness gives you some kind of peace. It is an artificially created dumbness, dullness, stupidity. This wears out the sensitivity of your senses and that u think is what you have achieved. When that is gone you are back again .

Even when you are silent the movement of thought still there, if the movement of thought stops it is clinical death. So, therefore, meditation is suicidal that many died, that they all are selling such shoddy goods in the market and you want to buy them I wish you all the best. Thank you . Have a nice day.

The problem and its genesis was in the religious idea that man is at the centre of the universe, and everything is created for the benefit of the man. That is why man is no longer a part of nature. He has polluted , destroyed and killed off longer a part of nature. He has polluted , destroyed and killed off everything, all on account of his wanting to be at the centre of the universe, of all creation.

It is mortality that creates immortality. It is the known that creates the unknown. It is time that has created the timeless. It is thought that has created the thoughtless. Because

The four aims of life (purusharthas) Of the dharma(moral action), artha (monetery gain) , kama (sensual desire) and moksha( release), the first and the last are plain lies. In the remaining, there is no use thinking about the third from top in old age. The only thing that remains is money. That’s important for living. Try to practice that. That’s the only aim of life. Wishing u all the best .

Boredom is a bottomless pit. As long as you think that there is something more interesting, more purposeful, more meaningful to do than what you are actually doing , you have no way of freeing yourself from boredom.

We are made to believe that there is a purpose, and that belief is what is responsible for the tragedy of mankind today. We have also been made to believe that we are created for a grander purpose , for a nobler purpose , than all the species in this planet. This is not all. We are also told that the whole creation was created for the benefit of man: that’s why we have created all these problems – ecological and problems of pollution. Now, we are almost at a point where we are going to blow ourselves up. The planet is not in danger but we are in danger. You can pollute this planet and all kinds of things ; the planet can absorb everything- even these human bodies. If we are wiped out , nature knows what to do with the human bodies . It recycles them to maintain the energy level in the universe. That’s all it is interested in . So, we are no more purposeful or meaningful than any other thing on this planet. We are not created for any grander purpose than the ants that are there or the flies that are hovering around you or the mosquitoes that are sucking your blood . I can say all this , but we have no way of knowing anything . Even the scientists- they can say what they like . How does it interest us ?

It does not really matter as to how this whole universe was created- whether God created , or the whole thing came out of some dust and pebbles , or hydrogen atoms somewhere. It is for the scientists to talk about all this and every now and then come up with new theories. They will be amply rewarded and given Noble prizes. But the theories don’t help us to understand anything that we see no meaning or purpose in life . A living thing, a living organism is not interested in asking the question “What is the purpose of life ? What is the meaning of life? “.

When you were born, you were born with a cellular functioning inside the body which is known as cellular structure that at the end of each cell there is a memory that has come into you from 7 generations of your mother and 7 generations of your father and the content of that memory is nothing but culture and a belief that there is a creator and all that is what is your background and with such background you are in comfort zone and the cushion effect of the same is all that will make you disagree with me.

At any time, we are not living, you see. We are all, for all practical purposes, dead; because we live in the world of ideas which is dead, where there is nothing new. And it is possible to live only when we bring to an end the momentum of thought. The momentum of thought has a terrific momentum- twenty million years of momentum, that’s what they say. And it has no beginning at all. In order to understand the way we are functioning , it is very necessary for us to understand how we are thinking , the very thinking process. And so if I ask you a question — ‘ How do you know that you are living ? ‘ you look at yourself through your thought, your idea. It is an inference that you are living. You are breathing, you feel the pulse and the beat, and there is a movement.

The crux of the problem or the impediment is that background that if you could shed ( culture) or destroyed or disappears then what takes over is only the physical. Everything falls in its place; even the thought, which had been a master of this body , goes silent, becomes a servant, letting the body function in its own natural way .

When you touch something, you say it is soft. When you touch the other you say it is hard. You understand that. But how do you know that this is soft for yourself? How do you experience the hardness and how do you experience the softness independent of these words? When you touch the woman’s hand, you will say it is soft, or the pillow is soft. Actually do you know what this softness is and what this hardness is? How do you understand it?

You have experienced it before , you know. When you touch this and say it is hard that means you are bringing back this thing to your memory– what you have experienced before. So in exactly the same way, when this word does not interfere– at this particular moment, if it is possible for you to touch a thing without this word interfering– without your past experience coming into being , can you feel and at the same time communicate to me what that hardness or softness is?

Because man imagines that there is something more interesting, more meaningful, more purposeful to do than what he is actually doing. Anything you want above the basic needs creates this boredom for the human being. But you get the feeling, ‘ is that all’ ? Nature is interested in only two things – to survive and to reproduce one like itself. Anything you superimpose on that, all the cultural input, is responsible for the boredom of man. So we have varieties of religious experiences. You are not satisfied with your own religious teachings or games; so you bring in others from Asia or China. They become interesting because they are new. You pick up a new language and try to speak it and use it feel more important. But basically , it is the same thing.

No talent is required to reproduce. Nature has done a tremendous job in creating this extraordinary piece- the body. The body does not to want to learn anything from culture. It doesn’t want to know anything from us. We are always interested in telling this body how to function. All our experiences, spiritual or otherwise, are the basic cause of our suffering. The body is not interested in your bliss or your ecstasies. It is not interested in your pleasure. It is not interested in anything that you are interested in. And that is the battle that is going on all the time . But there seems to be no way out.

Nobody can exploit you if you are not interested in this mutual experience business. We always blame the enemy, the other person. In every area there are two persons involved. There is the exploiter and the exploited. And you are a part of that exploitation, a part of the game

The culture put forth by our parents and trained not to question them and that they don’t want you to question which they force on us everything they believed in , even the things they themselves did not believe and the things that did not operate in their lives– there is no use blaming them now. This is a silly idea, the Freudian idea that for everything that is happening your mother is responsible, or your father is responsible. We are grown up people. There is no point in blaming our mothers and fathers. Actually, it is not a one- way street. Even children want to be accepted by us. We force them to fit into this framework, and they want to be accepted by us. This is a two-way traffic.

We don’t want to come to terms with the fact that we can live only seventy or eighty years of life. With death , all that we have achieved during that span has come to an end. Not wanting to accept the fact that it is the end, we project the beyond and create all kinds of fantasies. The answer to the question is , what do you think is there now which will continue after the death of this body? As far as the body is concerned there is neither birth nor death. What we call death is nothing but a reshuffling of atoms , and the reshuffling of atoms takes place for the simple reason that the level of energy in this Universe has to be maintained. It is for this reason , that is , to maintain the level of energy that millions and millions of people have been wiped out through catastrophic events. For nature it is not catastrophic. An earthquake is as much a necessity, as much a part of the planetary activity as any other event. So trying to find out answers to such questions is nothing but dialectical thinking. It is not going to help solve the basic problems faced by mankind.

We don’t want to come to terms with the fact that we can live only seventy or eighty years of life. With death , all that we have achieved during that span has come to an end. Not wanting to accept the fact that it is the end, we project the beyond and create all kinds of fantasies. The answer to the question is , what do you think is there now which will continue after the death of this body? As far as the body is concerned there is neither birth nor death. What we call death is nothing but a reshuffling of atoms , and the reshuffling of atoms takes place for the simple reason that the level of energy in this Universe has to be maintained. It is for this reason , that is , to maintain the level of energy that millions and millions of people have been wiped out through catastrophic events. For nature it is not catastrophic. An earthquake is as much a necessity, as much a part of the planetary activity as any other event. So trying to find out answers to such questions is nothing but dialectical thinking. It is not going to help solve the basic problems faced by mankind.

Religion is rightly called the opium of the people. Yes it is . But there is relief from that opium. The body cannot tolerate all those meditation techniques that we impose on it. It ( meditation) brings about an imbalance in the chemistry of this living organism. All this is cultural input there (in us) , which is destroying the sensitivity of the whole system. Such actions of yours like breath- control and yoga blur the sensitivity of the sensory perceptions. All this is the enemy of the living organism.

It is the self- consciousness that occurred in the human species somewhere during the course of evolution ( if ther is one) that has separated the human species from the totality of nature. It( the self- consciousness) is responsible for the feeling that the human species is created for some grander purpose than all the other species on this planet. It caused the feeling that the whole creation is for the benefit of man. That’s how we have created all these ecological problems and problems of every kind. Our trying to take advantage of everything in nature is the source of problems. And it was at that time what we call ‘ identity’ took its birth. We for some reason seem compelled to maintain that identity.

The brain is not a creator. This is a statement , which many people may not accept, but this is what it is. Thoughts come from outside. There are no individuals at all. It is culture, society or whatever you want to call it, which has created all of us for the sole purpose of maintaining its status quo. At the same time it has also created the idea that you must become something different from what you are. That is why you try to better yourself, improve yourself. You want to become something other than what you are. That creates this neurotic situation.

The neurosis in the human species is absolutely essential. We have to maintain this neurosis in order to function in this society. There is no other way that we can function in this society except to live in hope and die in hope. There are some people who have given up. But we force them to become functional in this value system that we have created. We even push them to commit suicide lest they become manic- depressive individuals. We are solely responsible for driving all those people into a situation where they have put an end to themselves. They don’t want to be functional here. They have given up. .That is the reason why we can say that the psychiatrist is the enemy of this culture, because he is forcing all those people who have given up to fit into this value system. One of the tragic things that human culture has done to us is that it has placed before us the model of a perfect being. That perfect being is modeled after the great spiritual teachers.

The whole value system is born out of the demand to fit ourselves into this model we have before ourselves. We want to develop ourselves into perfect beings. This constant battle within ourselves is created by the value system. We never question that. The value system is false and it is falsifying us. Nature is trying to create something extraordinary, a perfect species. That is why each individual is unique. Because of this input of culture , it has become impossible for this organism to show uniqueness. We have destroyed the possibility of what nature can do . You only use this paradise that nature has created , including not only mankind but also all the species that exist in this planet . We are solely and fully responsible for the chaos that mankind has created , and there seems to be no way out of it. Every time a so- called savior comes along he says that he is an AVATAR and that he is the answer to all problems. This very thing , his claim that he is the answer , adds momentum to the existing chaos. It is making it impossible for us to stop and ask questions which we never asked before . We have got to ask these questions, because all the questions we have been asking are born out of the answers we already have . But no one who suggests we should ‘ go back ‘ has answers for us at all. And that situation makes it impossible for us to create something new. That is not the way we can resolve our problems . These ‘ go back ‘ and ‘ revive’ cries are useless slogans. .

Whatever is the great heritage of India, it is good for politicians to use and raise hopes in people’s hearts. But we are all products of that great heritage , and there is nothing to be proud about the people of this country today. We talked of the oneness or unity of life for centuries. Then why is there this poverty? Why is there this misery? Why haven’t we done anything to resolve these problems to the satisfaction of everybody? Why even today, after six decades of independence are we blaming the British for the problems? We are in a situation where we have to deal only with the political consciousness. Religion is dead, but the religious people are not ready to take back seats and admit to themselves that they have done an enormous mischief and now should leave everything to us. I maintain that all the political systems we have today including communism, are nothing but the warty outgrowth of the religious thinking of man.

All those who claim that they are on the side of Right and Justice and burn away the evil of others are the real enemies of the mankind. How does it matter , how the world chooses to blow itself up? What difference does it make whether the bomb has the markings of the stars and stripes or a hammer and sickle or a crescent or a Jewish star or the Ashoka chakra? In the vigorous dawn of the 21st century the world is heading towards complete and total annihilation. That too under the name of God. I wonder why men who ‘love’ their God excessively force others to love that God too? And if they refuse, why do they too eagerly exterminate them?

The demand to change is born out of your isolation. When once you think you can bring about a change in yourself, the demand to change the world is also there. But this human body is not interested in learning or knowing anything. All that is necessary for the survival of this living organism is already there. There is a tremendous intelligence there, and all that we have gathered and acquired through our intellect is no match for that. The human brain is not interested in anything that we are interested in , what the culture has imposed on us, in any of its ideation and mentations. The brain is so dull; you will be surprised. It is not interested in any experience of any kind. What it is interested in is to help the body function intelligently and sanely. But we have put the brain to a use for which nature has not intended it. The brain is not a creator. It is only a reactor; it reacts to stimuli. The mechanism that we have implanted in it as it were , through our education and culture, has made us believe that it is creator. All the thoughts that we are thinking are not self- generated. They are not spontaneous. They always come from outside and the brain is there only to translate this sensation– the translation that is necessary for the survival of this organism.

It is not interested in any of the spiritual experiences or anything that the mind is interested in . The mind is interested only in sensuality. It is born out of sensuality. It maintains its continuity in the field of sensuality. So all religious experiences of any kind are sensual in their nature. It is only the mind that is interested in spiritual experiences- bliss, compassion, truth, reality and all those kinds of things . But the body , the living organism is not interested in any of those things but only to respond to stimuli. Life is creative in the sense that it does not use any model. Anything we call creative is an imitation, a copy of something that is already there . It is second hand. You cannot say that something which nature has created is not up to the point. There is no blue print there. Whatever blue print is there is already there in the cell. Everything that is there now was there in that single cell. Everything is genetically controlled.

All insights, however extraordinary they may be , are worthless, because it is thought that has created what we call insight, and through that, it is maintaining its continuity and status quo.

The whole culture of our civilization is built on external violence, killing and getting killed , first in the name of God as symbolized by the church , then by religious institutions, and finally in the name of political ideologies as symbolized by the state. Killing is basic to our culture. Our culture is not based on harmony with nature.

HOLY MEN AND HOLY BUSINESS

We have been brainwashed for centuries by holy men that we must control our thoughts . Without thinking you would become a corpse . Without thinking the holy men wouldn’t have any means of telling us to control our thoughts . They would go broke . They have become rich telling others to control their thoughts.

The whole religious business is nothing but moral codes of conduct: you must be generous, compassionate, loving while all the time you remain greedy and callous . Codes of conduct are set by society in its own interests, sacred or profane. There is nothing religious about it. The religious man puts the priest , the censor, inside you. Now the policeman has been institutionalized and placed outside you. Religious codes and strictures are no longer necessary; it is all in the civil and criminal codes. You need not bother with these religious people anymore; they are obsolete. But they don’t want to lose their hold over people. It is their business ; their livelihood is at stake. There is no difference between the policeman and the religious man. It is a little more difficult with the policeman, for, unike the inner authority sponsored by the holy men, he lies outside you and must be bribed. The secular leaders tell you one way, the holy men another way. It makes no difference: as long as you are searching for peace of mind, you will have tormented mind con. If you try not to search ,or if you continue to search , you will remain the same. You have to stop.

It is not only your past. It is the entire past, entire existence of every human being and every form of life. It is not such an easy thing. It is like trying to stop this flow of the river through all those artificial means. It will inundate the whole thing.

Understanding yourself is one of the greatest jokes, perpetrated on the gullible and credulous people everywhere, not only by the purveyors of ancient wisdom- the holy men- but also by the modern scientists. The psychologists love to talk about self- knowledge, self- actualization, living from moment to moment and such rot. These absurd ideas are thrown at us as if they are something new. You have been brainwashed by all those holy men , Gurus, teachers and the so called enlightened people that the past should die, should come to an end. ‘If you attain this’ life would be hunky- dory- full of sweetness. You have fallen for all that romantic stuff. If you try to suppress the past and try to be in the present, it will drive you crazy . You are trying to control something which is beyond your control .

The holy men talk very best of money as if it has no importance for them, when in fact it is one of the most important things in their lives. These holy men are greedy,jealous and vindictive., just like everybody else. You want to live through your work, and through your children. These people want to live through their religious institutions. What these Gurus in the marketplace do is to sell you some ice packs and provide you with some comforters.

You are not interested in solving the problem because that will put an end to you. You want the problem to remain. You want the hunger to remain because if you are not hungry you will not seek this food from all these holy men. What they Are giving you are some scraps, bits of food, and you are satisfied.

All your experiences all your meditations all your prayers all that you do is self-centered. It is strengthening the self, adding momentum, gathering momentum, so it is taking you in the opposite direction. Whatever you do to be free from the self also is a self – centered activity.

YOU CANNOT FIND THE SEAT OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS

Krisna consciousness, Buddha consciousness, Christ consciousness or what have you , are all trips in the wrong direction ; they are within the field of time. The timeless can never be experienced, can never be grasped, contain, much less giving expression to by any man.

Culture is part of this human consciousness, so everything that man has experienced and felt before you is part of that consciousness. It is really a mystery. All the experiences- not necessarily your experiences during your span of thirty, forty or fifty years but the animal consciousness, the plant consciousness , the bird consciousness — all that is part of this consciousness.

This consciousness which is functioning in me, in you, in the garden slug and earthworm outside, is the same. In the natural state of mind it has no frontiers; in you there are frontiers– you are enclosed in that. What is the seat of human consciousness? You have no way at all finding out for yourself the seat of human consciousness, because it is all over , and you are not separate from that consciousness. Even with all the experiments that the brain physiologists and psychologists ate doing, wasting millions and millions of dollars just to find out the seat of human consciousness, they will never be able to find out at all. Nor will it be possible for anybody to find out the content of the whole thing — it is too vast. The genetic is only part of it . It is much more than the genetic

WHAT IS AWARENESS?

I am not particularly found of the word ‘ awareness’ . It is misused. It is a rubber coin, and everybody uses it to justify some of his actions , instead of admitting that he did something wrong. Sometimes you say ‘ I was not aware of what was going on there’. But awareness is an integral part of the activity of this human organism. This activity is not only specifically in the human organism but in all forms of life — the pig and the dog. The cat just looks at you and is in a state of choice-less awareness. To turn that awareness into an instrument which you can use to bring about a change is to falsify that. Awareness is an integral part of the living organism.

Awareness is not a divided state. They are not two states, awareness and something else. They are not two things. It is not that you are aware of something. Awareness is simply the action of the brain. The idea that you can use awareness to bring about some happier state of affairs, some sort of transformation or God – knows- what, is absurd. Awareness cannon be used to bring about a change in yourself or the world around you.

All this rubbish about the conscious and the unconscious, awareness and the self, is all a product of modern psychology. The idea that you can use awareness to get somewhere psychologically is very damaging. After more than a hundred years we seem unable to free ourselves from the psychological rubbish, Freud and the whole gang. Just what exactly do you mean by consciousness? You are conscious, aware only through thought. The other animals use thought. The dog, for example, can recognise it’s owner in a simple manner. They recognise without using language. Humans have added to the structure of thought, making it much more complex. If you could be in a state of awareness for a single moment once in your life the continuity would be snapped ( thought continuity) the illusion of the experiencing structure, the you, would collapse and everything would fall into the natural rythm. In this state you will not know what you are looking at. That is awareness.

THERE IS NO SELF, NO SOUL

The belief that there is a centre here that there is a spirit here, that there is a soul here, is what is responsible for that belief that there must be something beyond. Is there any such thing as soul? Is there any such thing as the I , is there any such thing as the psyche? Whatever you see there , whatever you experience there, is created by the knowledge you have of that self. There is no self, there is no I , there is no spirit, there is no soul, and there is no mind. That knocks off the whole list, and you have no way of finding out what you are left with. Ideas of soul and life after death are born out of the demand for permanence. That’s the basis of man’s religious thinking. All religious thinking is born out of the demand for permanence.

Religion, God, soul are all just words, ideas used to keep your psychological continuity intact. When these thoughts are not there, what is left is the simple, harmonious physical functioning of the organism.

When you actually do see and perceive for the first time that there is no self to realise, no psyche to purify, n o soul to liberate, it will come as a tremendous shock to that instrument ( thought). You have invested everything in that— the soul, mind, psyche , whatever you wish to call it– and suddenly it is exploded as a myth. It is difficult for you to look at reality, at your actual situation. One look does the trick . You are finished.

When you actually do see and perceive for the first time that there is no self to realise, no psyche to purify, n o soul to liberate, it will come as a tremendous shock to that instrument ( thought). You have invested everything in that— the soul, mind, psyche , whatever you wish to call it– and suddenly it is exploded as a myth. It is difficult for you to look at reality, at your actual situation. One look does the trick . You are finished.

I may say that there is nothing to be changed, but the revolutionary teachers come and tell us that there is something there in which you have to bring about a radical revolution, then we assume there is such a thing as soul, spirit or the self. What I assert all the time is that I or you cannot find anything like the self or soul there. When you realise there is no self to realise. What the hell you have been doing all the time ? You see, that hits you like lightning. Once that hits you, the whole mechanism of the body that is controlled by this thought is shattered. What is left is the tremendous living organism with an intelligence of its own. What you are left with is the pulse, the beat and the throb of life.

MIND IS A MYTH

There is no such thing as an unconditioned mind; the mind is conditioned. It is absurd. If there is a mind it is bound to be conditioned. There is no such thing as an open mind. There is no such thing as mind; mind is a myth. Since there is no such thing as mind the mutation of mind that many people talked about had no meaning. There is nothing there to be transformed radically or otherwise. There is no self to be realised. The whole religious structure that has been built on this foundation collapses because there is nothing there to realise.

The whole Buddhist philosophy is built on the foundation of that ‘ no mind’. Yet they have created tremendous techniques of freeing themselves from the mind . All the Zen techniques of meditation try to free you from the mind. But the very instrument that we are using to free ourselves from , the thing called ‘mind’ is the mind. Mind is nothing other than what you are doing to free yourself from the mind. But when it once dawns on you, by some strange chance or miracle, that the instrument that you are using to understand everything is not the instrument, and that there is no other instrument, it hits you like a bolt of lightning. The separation between mind and body must come to an end. Actually there is no separation. I have no objection to the word mind but it is not in one particular location or area. Every cell in your system has a mind of its own and it’s functioning or working is quite different from that of the other cells.

MIND or thought is not yours or mine. It is our common inheritance. There is no such thing as your mind and my mind ( it is in that sense mind is a myth) . There is only mind, the totality of all that has been known, felt and experienced by man , handed down from generation to generation . We are all thinking and functioning in that thought sphere just as we all share the same atmosphere for breathing.

You have, through ideation and mentation, created your own thoughts which you consider to be yours, just as when different colours are mixed into various hues, but all of them can be reduced to the seven basic colours found in nature. What you think are your thoughts are actually just combinations and permutations of the thoughts of others.

THOUGHT IS BOURGEOIS

Thought in its birth , in its origin, in its content, in its expression and in its action is very fascist. When I use the word ‘ fascist’ I use it not in the political sense but to mean that thought controls and shapes our thinking and our actions. So it is a very protective mechanism. It has no doubt helped us to be what we are today. It has helped us to create our high- tech and technology. It has made our life very comfortable. It has also made it possible for us to discover the laws of nature. But thought is a protective mechanism and is interested in its own survival. At the same time , thought is opposed fundamentally to the functioning of this living organism. It is thought that has invented the idea of cause and effect . There may not be any such thing as a cause at all. Every event is an individual and independent event. We link up all these events and try to create a story of our lives . But actually every event is an independent event. If we accept the fact that every event is an independent event in our lives, it creates a tremendous problem of maintaining what we call identity . And identity is the most important factor in our lives. We are able to maintain this identity through the constant use of memory, which is also thought. The constant use of memory or identity or whatever you call it is consuming a tremendous energy and it leaves us with no energy to deal with the problems of our living. Is there any way that we can free ourselves from the identity? As I said thought can only create problems it cannot help us to solve them. Through dialectical thinking about thinking itself we are only sharpening that instrument. All philosophies help us only to sharpen this instrument.

Thought is very essential for us to survive in this world. But it cannot help us in achieving the goals that we have placed before ourselves. The goals are unachievable through the help of thought. The quest for happiness as you mentioned is impossible because there is no such thing as permanent happiness . There are moments of happiness and there are moments of unhappiness. But the demand to be in a permanent state of happiness is the enemy of this body . This body is interested in maintaining its sensitivity of the sensory perceptions and also the sensitivity of the nervous system . That is very essential for the survival of this body. If we use that instrument of thought for trying to achieve the impossible goal of permanent happiness, the sensitivity of this body is destroyed . Therefore, the body is rejecting all that we are interested in- permanent happiness and permanent pleasure . So we are not going to succeed in that attempt to be in a permanent state of happiness.

You have, through ideation and mentation, created your own thoughts which you consider to be yours, just as when different colours are mixed into various hues, but all of them can be reduced to the seven basic colours found in nature. What you think are your thoughts are actually just combinations and permutations of the thoughts of others.

Thought is Matter. Therefore, all our spiritual goals are materialistic in their value. And this is the conflict that is going on there. In this process the totality of man’s experiences created what we call a separate identity and a separate mind. But actually if you want to experience anything, be it your own body , or your own experiences, you have no way of experiencing them without the use of the knowledge that is passed on to us.

All the problems are artificially created by the various structures created by human thinking. There is some sort of neurological problem in the human body . Human thinking is born out of this neurological defect in the human species . Anything that is born out of human thinking is destructive. Thought is destructive . Thought is a protective mechanism. It draws frontiers around itself, and it wants to protect itself. It is for the same reason that we also draw lines on this planet and extend them as far as we can . Do you think these frontiers are going to disappear? They are not . Those who have entrenched themselves , those who have had the monopoly of all the world’s resources so far and for so long , if they are threatened to be dislodged, what they would do is anybody’s guess. All the destructive weapons that we have today are here only to protect that monopoly.

But actually the question ‘ is there a thought’ is born out of the assumption that there is a thought there. But what you will find there is all about thought and not thought. All about thought is what is put in there by the culture. That is put in by the people who are telling us that it is very essential for you to free yourself from whatever you are trying to free urself from through that instrument . My interest is to emphasise that that is not the instrument , and there is no other instrument. And once this hits you , dawns upon you that thought is not the instrument , and that there is no other instrument, then there is no need for you to find out if any other instrument is necessary. No need for any other instrument. This very same structure that we are using , the instrument which we are using, has in a very ingenious way invented all kinds of things like intuition, right insight, right this, that, and the other. And to say that through this very insight we have come to understand something is the stumbling block. All insights, however extraordinary they may be are worthless, because it is thought that has created what we call insight and through that it is maintaining its continuity and status quo .

Where does thought come from? It is from inside , or outside? Where is the seat of human consciousness? So for purposes of communication or just to give a feel about it . I say there is a THOUGHT SPHERE. In that Thought sphere we are all functioning and each of us probably has an ANTENNA or what you call an AERIAL or something , which is the creation of the culture into which we are born. It is that that is picking up these particular thoughts. You have no way at all of finding out for yourself the seat of human consciousness , because it is all over, and you are not separate from that consciousness. Even with all the experiments that the brain physiologists and psychologists are doing wasting millions of dollars just to find out the seat of human consciousness , they will never be able to find it out at all. This is not a dogmatic statement or any such thing .

Thought can never capture the movement of life, it is much too slow. It is like lightning and thunder. They occur simultaneously, but sound, traveling slower than light, reaches you later, creating the illusion of two separate events. It is only the natural physiological sensations and perceptions that can move with the flow of life.

There is no such thing as looking at something without the interference of knowledge. To look you need space, and thought creates that space. So space itself, as a dimension, exists only as a creation of thought. Thought has also tried to theorize about the space it has created, inventing the ‘ time- space continuum’. Time is an independent reference or frame. There is no necessary continuity between it and space. Thought has also invented the opposite of time, the ‘ now’ the ‘ eternal now’. The present exists only as an idea. The moment you attempt to look at the present, it has already been brought into the framework of the past. Thought will use any trick under the sun to give momentem to its own continuity. It’s essential technique is to repeat the same thing over and over again; this gives it an illusion of permanency. This permanency is shattered the moment the falseness of the past- present- future continuum is seen. The future can be nothing but the modified continuity of the past.

FEELING TOO IS THOUGHT

Feeling is also thought. We want to feel that feelings are more important than thoughts, but there is no way you can experience a feeling without translating that within the framework of the knowledge that you have. Take for example that you tell yourself that you are happy. You don’t even know that the sensation that is there is happiness. But you capture that sensation within the framework of the knowledge you have of what you call a state of happiness, and the other state, that of unhappiness. What I am trying to say is that it is the knowledge that you have about yourself which has created the self there and helps you to experience yourself as an entity there.

You think the thoughts of your society, feel the feelings of your society and experience the experiences of your society. There is no new experience.

All your relationships, knowledge and experiences, all your emotions and feelings, all that romantic stuff, belongs entirely to society, not to you. You are not an individual at all. Only when you are free from what every man and woman has thought and felt before you will you be come an individual. Such an individual will not burn books that men have made with great care. He would not be a rebel. All the accumulated knowledge, experience and suffering of mankind is inside of you. You must build a huge bonfire within you. Then you will become an individual. There is no other way.

KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERIENCE

Whatever you experience—- peace, bliss, silence, beautide, ecstacy, joy, God knows what — will be old and second-hand. You already have knowledge about all of these things. The fact that you are in a blissful state or in a state of tremendous silence means that you know about it. You must know a thing in order to experience it. That knowledge is nothing marvelous or metaphysical; bench , bag, red bag is the knowledge. Knowledge is something which is put into you by somebody else, and he got that from somebody else; it is not yours. Can you experience a simple thing like that bench that is sitting across from you? No, you only experience the knowledge you have about it. And the knowledge has come from some outside agency always. You think the thoughts of your society , feel the feelings of your society and experience the experiences of your society ; there is no new experience.

Knowledge is not something mysterious or mystical. You know that you are happy and you have theories about the working of the fan, the light–this is the knowledge we are talking about. You introduce another knowledge, ‘ spiritual knowledge’ but – spiritual knowledge, sensual knowledge- what is the difference? We give names to them. Fantasies about God are acceptable, but fantasies about sex are called’ sensual’ ‘physical’. Ther is no difference between the two; one is socially acceptable, the other is not. You are limiting knowledge to a particular area of experience, so then it becomes ‘sensual’ and the other becomes ‘ spiritual’? Everything is sensual.

You cannot communicate what you cannot experience. I don’t want to use those words, because ‘ inexpressible’ and incommunicable imply that there is something which cannot be communicated, which cannot be expressed. There is an assumption that there is something there which cannot be expressed, which cannot be communicated. There is nothing there. I don’t want to say there is nothing there, because you will catch me – you will call it ‘ emptiness’, ‘void’ and all that sort of thing.

Whatever is experienced is thought- induced. Without knowledge you can’t experience. And experience strengthens the knowledge. It is a vicious circle; the dog chasing its own tail.

Where, you ask, is this knowledge, the past? Is it in your brain? Where is it? It is all over your body. It is in every cell of your body.

IS THERE ANY MEANING AND PURPOSE TO LIFE ?

What is the meaning of life? It is not life that we are really interested in but living. The problem of living has become a very tiring business- to live with somebody else, to live with our feelings, to live with our ideas. In other words it is the value system that we have been thrown into. You see, the value system is false.

The heart does not for a moment know that it is pumping blood. It is not asking the question, Am I doing it right? It is just functioning. It does not ask the question ‘ is there any purpose’ ? To me that question has no meaning. The question ‘ is there any meaning? Is there any purpose? take away the living quality of life . You are living in a world of ideas.

Suppose I say that this meaninglessness is all there is for you, all there can ever be for you. What will you do? The false and absurd goal you have before is responsible for that dissatisfaction and meaninglessness in you. Do you think life has any meaning? Obviously you don’t. You have been told that there is meaning, that there must be a meaning to life. Your notion of the ‘ meaningful’ keeps you from facing this issue, and makes you feel that life has no meaning. If the idea of meaningful is dropped, you will see meaning in whatever you are doing in daily life.

Why should life has any meaning ? Why should there be any purpose to living ? Living itself is all that is there. Your search for spiritual meaning has made a problem out of living. You have been fed all this rubbish about the ideal, perfect, peaceful, purposeful way of life and you devote your energies to thinking about that rather than living fully. In any case you are living, no matter what you are thinking about life

Life has to go on and should go on without questions like ‘ what is death ‘ or ‘ what is there after death ‘ which simply imply that with such questions you are already dead. These are already dead questions. A living man would never ask those questions.

CREATION AND DESTRUCTION : THE RESHUFFLING OF ATOMS

Why does nature deliberately want to first create and then destroy ? Because nothing is ever born and nothing ever dies. What has created the space between creation and destruction or the time between the two , is thought. In nature there is no death or destruction at all. What occurs is the reshuffling of atoms . If there is a need or necessity to maintain the balance of energy in this Universe , death occurs . You may not like it. Earthquakes may be condemned by us . Surely they cause misery to so many thousands and thousands of people . And all this humanitarian activity around the world — sending plane loads of supplies is really a commendable act. It helps those who are suffering there and those who have lost their property. But it is the same kind of activity that is responsible for killing millions and millions of people . What I am saying is that the destructive, war – making movement and the humanitarian movement on the other hand – are both born from the same source.

In the long run , earthquakes and the eruption of volcanoes are part of nature’s way of creating something new ……. Of course it does not mean that you should not do anything to help those people affected by earthquakes. In nature the positive and negative don’t exist at all. They don’t exist at all. If they do they exist in the same frame. That is what these scientists are talking about. If you observe the universe, ther is chaos in it. The moment you say there is chaos, in the same frame , there is also order. So , you cannot for sure say that there is order or chaos in the universe. Both of them are occuring simultaneously. That is the way the living organism also operate. The moment thought is born , it cannot stay there . Thought is Matter. When once the matter that is necessary for the survival of the living organism is created, that matter becomes part of energy. Similarly life and death are simultaneous process. It is thought that has seperated and created the two points of birth and death. Thought has created this space and time. But actually, birth and death are simultaneous process.

The military wars out there are the extension of what is going on all the time inside you. Why is there a war waging inside you ? Because you search for peace. The instrument you are using in your attempt to be at peace with yourself is war. There is already peace in man . You need not search. The living organism is functioning in an extraordinarily peaceful way. Man’s search for truth is born out of this same search for peace. It only ends up disturbing and violating the peace that is already there in the body. So what you are left with is the war within and the war without. It’s an extension of the same thing. Our search in this world for peace , being based upon warfare, will only lead to war, towards damnation. Humanity has polluted, destroyed and killed off everything , all on account of his wanting to be at the centre of the universe , of all creation.

IS THERE A BEYOND or TIMELESSNESS ?

Is there a beyond ? Because you are not interested in the everyday things and the happenings around you , you have invented a thing called the ‘ beyond ‘ or ‘ timelessness ‘ or ‘ God ‘ ‘ truth ‘., ‘ Reality ‘ ‘ Brahman ‘ ‘ enlightenment ‘ or whatever , and you search for that. There may not be any beyond. You don’t know a thing about that beyond ; whatever you know is what you have been told , the knowledge you have about that. So you are projecting that knowledge. What you call ‘ beyond ‘ is created by that knowledge you have about that beyond ; and whatever knowledge you have about a beyond is exactly what you will experience. The knowlege creates the experience , and the experiance then strengthens the knowledge. What you know can never be the beyond. Whatever you experience is not the beyond. If there is any beyond , this moment of ‘ you ‘ is absent. The absence of this movement probably is the beyond , but the beyond can never be experienced by you ; it is when the ‘ you ‘ is not there. Why are you trying to experiance a thing that cannot be experienced ?

The fictitious beyond , created by thought out of fear , is really the demand for more of the same in modified form. This demand for repetition of the same thing over and over again is the demand for permanence.

There is nothing there inside you but the totality of this kbowledge you have accumulated. That is what you are . You cannot even directly experiance the reality of the world in which you are functuoning, much less some world beyond. There is no world beyond space and time . It is your invention based upon the vague promises of the holy men .

In the natural state the movement of self is absent. The absence of this movement probably is the beyond but that can never be experienced by you. It is when the You is not there. The moment you translate, the YOU is there. You look at something and recognise it. Thought interferes with the sensation by translating. You are either thinking about something which is totally unrelated to the way the senses are functuoning at the moment or else labelling. That is all there. The word separates you from what you are looking at, thereby creating the you. Otherwise there is no space between the two .

THE SEARCH FOR GOD IS THE SEARCH FOR PERMANENT HAPPINESS. Man has to be saved from God— that is very essential because —-I don’t mean God in the sense in which you use the word God ; I mean all that ‘ God ‘ stands for , not only God, but all that is associated with that concept of God– even Karma , reincarnation, rebirth, life after death , the whole thing , the whole business of what you call the ‘ great heritage of India ‘ — all that, you see. Man has to be saved from the heritage of India. Not only the people; the country has to saved from that heritage. ( Not by revolution, not the way they have done it in the communist countries- that’s not the way. I don’t know why; you see this is a tricky subject) . Otherwise there is no hope for the individual and no hope for the country.

The messy thing called the mind has created many destructive things, and by far the most destructive of them all is God. To me the question of God is irrelavant and immaterial . We have no use for God. More people have been killed in the name of God than in the two world wars put together . In Japan millions of people died in the name of the sacred Buddha. Christians and Muslim s have done the same . Even in India five thousand Jains were massacred in a single day. Yours is not a peaceful nation. Read your own history– it’s full of violance from the beginning to the end. Man is merely a biological being. There is no spiritual side to his nature. There is no such thing …….. All the virtues, principles , beliefs, ideas and spiritual values are mere affectations. They haven’t succeeded in changing anything in you . You are still the brute that you have always been. When will you begin to see the truth that the philosophy of ‘ Love thy neighbour as thyself ‘ is not what stops you from killing indiscriminately but it’s the terror of the fact that if you kill your neighbour you too will be destroyed along with him that stops you from killing.

God is the ultimate pleasure, uninterrupted happiness. No such thing exist. Your wanting something that does not exist is the root of your problem. Transformation, moksha, liberation and all that stuff are just variations on the same theme; permanent happiness.

We have used God to justify the killing of millions of people. We exploit God. You don’t want to read your own history . It’s full of violance from the beginning to the end. God is irrelavant. … there is no power outside of man. It is the same power, the same life that is functioning there in you. Something is trying to express itself and the culture is pushing it down . When once it throws the culture out it expresses itself in its own way .

RELIGION IS A NEUROLOGICAL PROBLEM

Religion is not a contractual arrangement, either public or private. It has nothing to do with the social structure or its management. Religious authority wants to continue its hold on the people, but religion is entirely an individual affair. The saints and saviours have only succeeded in setting you adrift in life with pain and misery and the restless feeling that there must be something more meaningful or interesting to do with one’s life.

‘ Religion ‘, God , Soul , Beatitudes, Moksha are all just words , ideas used to keep your psychological continuity intact. When these thoughts are not there , what is left is the simple , harmonious physical functioning of the organism. Love , compassion , ahimsa, understanding, bliss all these things which religion and psychology have placed before man , are only adding to the strain of the body . ALL CULTURES whether of the Orient or of the Occident have created this lopsided situation for mankind and turned man into a neaurotic individual.

Man has already messed up his life, and religion has made it worse. It is religion that really made a mess of man’s life.

You cannot exonerate the founders and leaders of religions. The teachings of all those teachers and saviours of mankind have resulted in only violance. Everybody talked of peace and love, while their followers practised violence.

Religion is not going to save man; neither atheism nor communism nor any of those systems. Not only the teachings but the teachers themselves have sown the seeds of this violence that we have in this world. You can’t put them on a pedestal and say that they should be exonerated. The man who talked of love is responsible because love and hate go together. So how can you exonerate them? Why do you want to revive religion? What for ? I am not condemning any particular thing. All are responsible for that. Talk of love is one of the most absurd things. There must be two. Wherever there is a division there is this destruction. Kindness needs two. You are kind to somebody or you are kind to yourself . There is a division in your consciousness . Anything born out of that division is a protective mechanism and in the long run it is destructive.

Man has created religion because it gives him cover. You see, good and bad , right and wrong are like the two ends of the spectrum, one cannot exist independent of the other. When once you are finished with this duality , when you are no longer caught up in the dichotomy of Right and wrong or good and bad you can never do anything wrong. As long as you are caught up in it the danger is that you will always do wrong and if you don’t do wrong because you are a frightened chicken. It is out of this cowardice that the whole religious thinking is born.

The whole structure of religious thought is built on the foundation of discipline. Discipline to me means a sort of masochism. We are all masochists. We torture ourselves because we think that the suffering is a means to achieve our spiritual goals. That’s unfortunate. Life is difficult so discipline sounds very attractive to people. We admire those who have suffered a lot to achieve their goals. As a matter of fact the whole religious thinking is built on the foundation of suffering. Those who impose that kind of discipline on us are sadists and we are all being masochists in accepting that we torture ourselves in the hope of achieving something.

Whatever man experiances— self – awareness, self- consciousness– he has sown the seeds of his total destruction. All those religions have come out of that divisive consciousness in man All the teachings of those teachers will inevitably destroy mankind. There is no point in reviving all those things and starting revivalistic movements. That is dead, finished. Anything that is born out of this division in your consciousness is destructive, is violence. It is so because it is trying to protect not this living organism, not life but the continuity of thought. And through that it can maintain the status quo of your culture or whatever you want to call it, the society. The problems are neurological.

Your highly praised inventiveness springs from your thinking, which is essentially a protective mechanism. The mind has invented both religion and dynamite to protect what it regards as its best interests. There is no good or bad in this sense. Don’t you see? All these bad, brutal, terrible people who should have been eliminated long ago are thriving and successful. Don’t think that you can get off this merry- go- round or that by pretending to be spiritually superior you are avoiding any complicity. You are that.

IS THERE SUCH A THING AS TRUTH Truth is a movement. You can’t capture it, give expression to it or use it to advance your interests. The moment you capture it, it ceases to be the truth. What is the truth for me is something that cannot under any circumstances, be communicated to you. The certainty here cannot be transmitted to another. For this reason the whole guru business is absolute nonsense. This has always been the case, not just now. Your self- denial is to enrich the priests. You deny yourself your basic needs while the man travels in a Rolls Royce car, eating like a king, and being treated like a potentate. He and the others in the holy business, thrive on the stupidity and credulity of others. The politicians similarly thrive on the gullibility of man. It is the same everywhere.

Whatever you do in the pursuit of truth or reality takes you away from your own natural state in which you always are. It’s not something you can acquire, attain or accomplish as a result of your effort. All that you do makes it impossible for what already is there to express itself. That’s why I call this your natural state. You are always in that state. What prevents what is there from expressing itself in its own way is the search. The search is always in the wrong direction.

Because you are not interested in the everyday things and happenings around you, you have invented beyond, timelessness, God, truth, reality, entertainment or whatever, and search for it.

There may not be ultimate truth. You don’t know a thing about it. Whatever you know is what you have been told, what you have heard, and you are projecting that information. What you call something is determined by the learning you have about it, and whatever knowledge you have about it is exactly what you will experience. The knowledge creates the experience and the experiance then strengthens the knowledge. What you know can never be the ultimate reality.

There is nothing there , only your relative, experiential data, your truth. There is no such thing as objective truth at all. There is nothing which exists outside or independent of our minds.

There may not be any ultimate truth. You don’t know a thing about it. Whatever you know is what you have been told, what you have heard, and you are projecting that information. What you call something is determined by the learning you have about it,and whatever knowledge you have about it is exactly what you will experience. The knowlege creates the experience and the experiance then strengthens the knowledge. What you know can never be the ultimate reality. There is nothing there,only your relative,experiential data,your truth. There is no such thing as objective truth at all. There is nothing which exists outside or independent of our minds.

THERE IS NO FREEDOM OF ACTION

I maintain that man has no freedom of action. I don’t mean the fatalism that Indians have practised and are still practising: when I say man has no freedom of action it is in relation to changing himself, to freeing himself from the burden of the past. It means that you have no way of acting except through the help of knowledge that is passed on to you. It is in that sense, I said no action is possible without thought. So what is necessary is that the individual should free himself from the burden of the past, the great heritage you are talking about. Unless the individual frees himself from the burden of the past, he cannot come up with new solution for the problems; he repeats the same old……..so it is up to the individual. He has to free himself from the entire past, the heritage which you are talking about that is to say he has to break away from the cumulative wisdom of the ages– only then it is possible for him to come out with the solutions for the problems with which man is confused today. But that is not in his hands; there is nothing that he can do to free himself from the burden of the past. It is that sense that I say he has no freedom of action. You have freedom to come here or not to come here, to study or teach philosophy or something else- there you have limited freedom. But you have no freedom to control the events of the world or shape the events of the world– nobody has that power, no nation has that power.

MAN IS MEMORY

The mind is the totality of man’s experiances, thoughts and feelings. There is no such thing as your mind and my mind, how they are transmitted to us from generation to generation is the question. Is it through the medium of knowledge or is there any other way by which they are transmitted from generation to generation, say for example through the genes?. We don’t have the answer yet. Then we come to the idea of memory. What is man ? Man is memory. What is that memory? Is it something more than just to remember, to recall a specific thing at a specific time? To all this we have to have some more answers. How do the neurons operate in the brain? It is all in one area? A knowledgeable neurosurgeon says that memory or rather the neurons containing memory are not in one area. The eye, the ear, the nose all the five sensory organs in your body have a different sort of memory. But they don’t yet know for sure. So we have to get more answers.

There is always a space between perception and memory. Memory is like sound. Sound is very slow, whereas light travels faster. All these sensory activities or perceptions are like light. They are very fast. But for some reason we have lost the capacity to kick that(memory) into the background and allow these things to move as fast as they occur in nature. Thought comes, captures it (the sensory perception) and says that it is this or that. That is what you call recognition, or naming , or whatever you want to call it. The moment you recognise this as the tape recorder, the name tape recorder also is there. So recognition and naming are not two different things. We maintain the separation and keep up a non – existing identity. That is the reason why you have to constantly use your memory, which is nothing but the neurons, to maintain your identity. Who am I ? What is the meaning of life? Does God exist? Or is there an afterlife? — all these questions spring only from memory. That is why I ask whether you have a question of your own. Can you become conscious of anything except through the medium of memory and thought? Memory is knowledge. Even your feelings are memory. To attempt to be free from memory is withdrawal, and withdrawal is death.

DO YOU EXIST ?

You don’t exist. There is no individual there at all. Culture, society, or whatever you want to call it, has created’ you ‘ and ‘ me’ for the sole purpose of maintaining its own continuity. But at the same time we are made to believe that you have to become an individual.. These two things have created this neurotic situation for us. There is no such thing as an individual and there is no such thing as freedom of action. This is not a fatalistic philosophy or any such thing. It is this fact that is frustrating us.The demand to fit ourselves into that value system is using a tremendous amount of energy and there is nothing we can do to deal with the living problems here. All the energy is being consumed by the demands of the culture or society, or whatever you want to call it, to fit you into the framework of that value system. In the process, we are left with no energy to deal with the other problems. But these problems that is the living problems, are very simple.

After all, you don’t exist, and I don’t exist. You and I have been created by the totality of those experiances, and we have to use them in order to function sanely and intelligently in this world. One thing that is to be emphasised is that it is culture that has created us all for the sole purpose of maintaining its status quo and it’s continuity. So in that sense I do not see that there are any individuals at all. At the same time, the same culture has given us hope that there is something that you can do to become an individual and that there is such a thing as free will. Actually, there is no free will at all.

The whole of culture has created this situation for us through its value system. The value system demands that relationships be based on love, but the most important elements are security and possessiveness. When your hold on the other weakens, the relationship wears out. You cannot maintain this lovely- dovey relationship all the time.

The relationship between a man and a woman is based on the images that the two create for themselves of each other. So the actual relationship between the two individuals is a relationship between the two images. But your image keeps changing and so does the other person’s. To keep the image constant is just not possible. So when everything else fails we use this final, last card in the pack, love, with all the marvellous and romantic ideations around it.

MARRIAGE IS POSSESSIVENESS

The institution of marriage is not going to disappear. As long as we demand relationships, it will continue in some form or other. Basically, it is a question of possessiveness. The marriage institution will somehow continue because it is not just the relationship between the two, but children and property are involved. And we use property and children as a pretext to give continuity to the institution of marriage. The problem is so complex and so complicated. It is not so easy for anybody to come up with answers to the age old institution of marriage.

LOVE IS FASCIST

When everything fails, you use the last card, the trump in the pack of cards, and call it love. But it is not going to help us and it has not helped us at all. Even religion has failed to free man from violance and from ten other things that is trying to free us from. You see, it is not a question of trying to find new concepts, new ideas, new thoughts and new beliefs. But I am sure that the day has come for people to realise that all the weapons that we have built so far are redundant and that they cannot be used anymore. We have arrived at a point where you cannot destroy your adversary without destroying yourself. So it is that kind of terror, and not the love and brotherhood that have been preached for centuries, that will help us to live together. What an amount of energy we are putting into making our relationship into a loving thing. It is a battle, it is a war. It is like preparing youself all the time for war hoping that there will be peace, eternal peace, or this or that. You are tired of this battle, and you even settle for that horrible, non- loving relationship. And you hope and dream one day it wii be nothing but love. ‘ love thy neighbour as thyself……’ in the name of that how many millions of people have been killed? More than all the recent wars put together. How can you love thy neighbour as thyself? It is just not possible. Love implies division, separation. As long as there is division, as long as there is a separation within you, you maintain that separation around you. When everything fails, you use the last card, the trump in the pack of cards and call it love. … we say: I love my country, I love my dog, I love my wife. What happens? You love your country, I love my country, and there is war. It is not going to help us and it has not helped us at all. Even religion has failed to free man from violence and from ten other different things that is trying to free us from. It is not a question of trying to find new concepts, new ideas ,new thoughts and new beliefs.

What after all is this world ? The world is the relationship between two individuals. But that relationship is based on the foundation of’ What do I get out of a relationship ? ‘ Mutual gratification is the basis of all relationships. If you don’t get what you want out of a relationship, it goes sour. What there is in the place of what you call a ‘ loving relationship ‘ is hate. The whole music of our age is all around that song , love love, love…But love is fascist in its nature, in its birth, in its expression and in its action. It cannot do us any good. We may talk of love but it doesn’t mean anything.

SEX IS THOUGHT

It is a very simple functioning of the living organism. The religious man has turned that into something big and concentrated on the control of sex. After that the psychologists have that into something extraordinary. You may ask : Is not sex a basic human requirement ? Sex is dependent on thought; the body itself has no sex. Only the genitals and perhaps the harmone balance differ between male and female. It is thought that says ‘ I am a man, and that is a woman an attractive woman ‘. It is thought that translates sex feelings in the body and says, ‘ these are sexual feelings ‘. And it is thought that provides the build-up without which no sex is possible; ‘it would be more pleasurable to hold that woman’s hand than just to look at her. It would be more pleasurable to kiss her than just to embrace her ‘ and so on. In the natural state that it is there is no build up of thought according to the experienced, and without that build-up sex is impossible. And sex is tremendously violent to the body. The body normally is a peaceful organism and then you subject it to this tremendous tension and release, which feels pleasurable to you. Actually it is painful to the body. But through suppression or attempts at sublimation of sex you will never come into the natural state as experienced. As long as you think of God you will have thoughts of sex. Ask any religious seeker you may know who practices celibacy, whether he doesn’t dream of women at night. The peak of the sex experience is the one thing in life you have that comes close to being a first-hand experience; all the rest of your experiences are second-hand, somebody else’s. Why do you weave so many taboos and ideas around this ? Why do you destroy the joy of sex ? Not that I am advocating indulgence or promiscuity; but through abstinence and continence you will never achieve a thing.

I am just pointing out the use to which we are putting that simple biological function. I am not condemning it. It is there, you see. Your talk of that as an expression of love has no meaning. We would love to put it that way because it is comforting. If sex is used only for biological purpose it is not really a devastating situation. If you leave it as it is it wouldn’t be so horrible, the way you would like to put it, it would fall into its proper place. That is why we have invented all these other things– God-Truth and reality–which are nothing but ultimate pleasures.

Sex has to be put in its proper place as one of the natural functionings of the body. It is solely mainly and wholly for the purpose of reproducing or procreating something like this. It has no other place in the functioning of the body. Thought always interferes with sex. It has become a pleasure movement. I am not saying anything against it. After that it goes. Thereafter what you are left with is the natural functioning of the glands. So we have to revise all our ideas about this whole business of sex. We give a tremendous importance to sex and so the denial of it becomes suxh an obsession with people. In India, they even moved away from that denial and created what is called tantric sex. It was the highest pleasure that human beings could have, sex through tantra was considered the highest. The fact is that the person is very much there even at the moment when there is peak sex experience. The experience has already been captured by your memory. Otherwise, you have no way of experiencing that as a peak moment. If that peak moment remained as peak moment that would be the just end of sex. That would be the end of everything. The fact that you remember it as a peak moment and want to repeat it over and over again implies that it has already become part of your experiencing structure. You want it always and then want to extend it for longer and longer periods of time.

ISN’T THE HEART DIFFERENT FROM THE MIND ?

You want to know ? You are making this assumption that to have a ‘ heart ‘ is better than to use your head. The whole religious thinking is built on the foundation of having a good heart and giving supremacy and importance to it, and not to what your ‘ head ‘ is doing. But what I want to say is that the heart is there only to pump blood. It is not interested in your kindly deeds. If you indulge in kindly deeds, doing good unto others, having a good heart you will only create problems for the heart. It is the beginning of your cardiac problems. That’s going to be a real problem. It is your kindly deeds that are responsible for the cardiac arrests and heart failures, and not any malfunctioning of the heart. The tremendous importance that we have given to the heart is totally irrelavant. To make a distinction between the ‘ head’ and the ‘ heart ‘ is interesting but in the long run it is not going to help us.

DESIRE AND SELFISHNESS

Man is always selfish, and he will remain selfish as long as he practices selflessness as virtue. This is not against selfish people. I don’t want to talk about selflessness– it has no basis at all. You say ‘ I will be a selfless man tomorrow. Tomorrow I will be a marvellous man ‘– but until tomorrow arrives ( or the day after tomorrow, or the next life) you will remain selfish. What do you mean by selflessness. You tell everybody to be self less. What is the point. I never said to anybody, ‘Don’t be self less.’. Be selfish, stay selfish– that’s my message. Wanting enlightenment is selfishness. The rich man’s charity is also selfishness: he will be remembered as a generous man; you will put up a statue of him there. You have been told that you should practice desirelessness. You have practised desirelessness for thirty or forty years, but still desires are there. So something must be wrong somewhere. Nothing can be wrong with desire; something must be wrong with the one who has told you to practise desirelessness. This(desire) is a reality; that( desirelessness) is false–it is falsifying you. Desire is there. Desire as such can’t be wrong, can’t be false, because it is there.

ISN’T THE HEART DIFFERENT FROM THE MIND ?

You want to know ? You are making this assumption that to have a ‘ heart ‘ is better than to use your head. The whole religious thinking is built on the foundation of having a good heart and giving supremacy and importance to it, and not to what your ‘ head ‘ is doing. But what I want to say is that the heart is there only to pump blood. It is not interested in your kindly deeds. If you indulge in kindly deeds, doing good unto others, having a good heart you will only create problems for the heart. It is the beginning of your cardiac problems. That’s going to be a real problem. It is your kindly deeds that are responsible for the cardiac arrests and heart failures, and not any malfunctioning of the heart. The tremendous importance that we have given to the heart is totally irrelavant. To make a distinction between the ‘ head’ and the ‘ heart ‘ is interesting but in the long run it is not going to help us.

You hope that you will be able to resolve the problem of desire through thinking, because of that model of a saint who you think has controlled or eliminated desire. If that man has no desire as you imagine, he is a corpse. Don’t believe that man at all. Such a man builds some organisations and lives in luxury, which you pay for. You are maintaining him. He is doing it for his livelihood. There is always a fool in the world who falls for him. Once in a while he allows you to prostrate before him. You will be surprised if you live with him. You will get the shock of your life if you see him there. That’s why there are all aloof- because they are afraid you will catch them some time or the other. The rich man is always afraid that you will touch him for money. So too the religious man- he never,never comes in contact with you. Seeing him is far more difficult than seeing the president of your country- that is a lot easier than seeing a holy man. He is not what he says he is, not what he claims he is.

As long as there is a living body there will be desire. It is natural. Thought has interfered and tried to suppress, control, and moralise about desire, to the detriment of mankind. We are trying to solve the ‘ problem’ of desire through thought. It is thinking that has created the problem. You somehow continue to hope and believe that the same instrument can solve your other problems as well. You hope against hope that thought will put you through, but you will die in hope just you have lived in hope.

POLITICS HAS IT’S ROOT IN RELIGIOUS THINKING

All the political ideologies, even your legal structures. are the warty outgrowth of the religion thinking of man. It is not easy to flush out the whole series of experiences which have been accumulated through centuries. and which are based upon the religious thinking of man. there is a tendency to replace one belief with another belief, one illusion with another illusion. that is all we can do.

It is the constant demand for permanence which cripples society. because we all seek permanence inwardly, we demand that those things which we perceive to lie outside ourselves–society, humanity,the nation and the world—also be permanent. we seek our permanence through them. all forms of permanence, whether personal or collective, are your own creation. they are all an extension of the very same demand for permanence. but nothing is permanent. Our efforts to make things permanent go entirely against. the way of nature. Somehow you know that you will not succeed in your demand for permanence. Yet you persist.

Human nature being what it is, what can you expect ? Falseness of human values has ended up in the church, monarchy, temples and politics. We have elected and placed men in power, and with the very same power they will destroy everything. It is nothing but the power game. All heritage is born of a diseased mind. Man is corrupt and lays the blame at the feet of the coined word ‘ heritage’. The unwillingness to change with the changing times you call tradition.

If religion does not hold the key, if political ideologies have failed, there must be some other solution, some other answer. These are extremely important questions to ask and find answers for, on which depends the fate of the world. Traditional values and the military might of America cannot save anyone. You have grown up with the sense that America is the centre of the world. You were better at everything. Today the glory is gone; You are an also-ran. You are another England! This is a blot to your national image. You are being overtaken by oothers. I am as terrified if the U S gets dumped from it’s throne as you will be; what you would is anybody’s guess… The Russian revolution is a total failure. That revolution is only a revaluation of a value system. They replaced one system with another system of values .Which system will blow up the world ? It matters not who is going to blow up the world. The solutions to the world’s problems do not rest with your bereaucrats or the big boys. They are muddle- headed and low-grade morons; so are the other leaders of mankind. you can’t get rid of them. You have delegated your power to them, placed them in the seats of power, and handed over the most destructive weapons to them. they are the defence that turned against you.

DEATH OF IDEOLOGIES

I have more faith in the scientific community than in all these jokers that are going around ‘saving ‘ mankind. We need to be saved from the self appointed saviours of mankind. No, they are the ones who are responsible for the terrible situation we find ourselves in today. We don’t realise that it is they who have created this mess for us. They had their day, and have utterly, totally failed. Still they refuse to take a back seat. That’s it. We are stuck. You study the history of mankind; monarchies, revolutions, democracies and more revolutions. Everything has failed us; everything is over. Not one ideology will survive. What’s left for us ? Democracy, the noble experiment is over. Everything is over. We find ourselves in a situation where these issues will be decided by your boss. Take the problem of starvation, one Side says , ‘ My political system will solve the problem of starvation in this world ‘ and the other side says ‘ No , mine will ‘ ; and both of them end up on the battlefield brandishing their atomic weapons. That is the reality of the situation. Every where, on every continent there is confrontation. The basic issue in the world is , of course , economic. Who will control the resources of the world ?. The nine rich nations of the world have been so used to controlling the resources of the world. They sit in Basel , Switzerland , and say , ‘ Here is the price you must take for your products. Take it or leave it .’. A country like the United States may talk of freedom , democracy , and Justice , but they would like to have military governments in countries like those of South America. They prefer to do business with militarised , authoritarian states. A military is very useful to run those countries. That is a fact. The only answer to this human problem , if there is any answer , is not to be found through new ideas , new concepts or new ideologies but through bringing about a change in the chemistry of the humab body.

REVOLUTION IS ONLY REVALUATION OF THE OLD………

What kind of human being do you want on this globe ?. The human being modelled after the perfect being has totally failed. The model has not touched anything there. The value system is the one that is responsible for the human malady , the human tragedy , forcing everybody to fit into that model. So what do we do ? You cannot do anything by destroying the value system , because you replace one value system with another. Even those who rebelled against religion , like those in the communist countries , have themselves created another kind of value system. So, revolutions does not mean end of anything. It is only a revaluation of our value system. So, that needs another revolution , and so on and on. There is no way. Every human being is different. That is all I am saying. There is no body like you anywhere in this world– I tell you, no body! I am talking physiologically. But we ignore that , and try to put everybody in a common mould and create what we call the greatest common factor. All the time you are trying to educate them and fit them into the value system. If that value system does not work , naturally revolutions take place. The whole idea of restructuring is nothing but a revaluation of the old value system. Revolution only means revaluation of our value system. It is the same thing. After a while things settle down , and then they go at it again. There is no improvement again. Or there is a slight improvement. But it is basically a modified continuity of the same. In that process what horrors we have committed you know. Is it really worth all that ? But you seem to think that it is. After killing so many people you go back to the same system , the same technique . What is the point ?. The society in which we are living today considers certain actions as socially acceptable and certain other actions antisocial. You may call yourself a rebel , a revolutionary and break away but you will certainly create another form no different and distinct from the structure in which you are caught up . There is no such thing as a revolution at all. What you call revolution is only a revaluation of your value system. The basic problem is the impossibility of fitting yourself into the framework , so you want to create another kind of a framework, a new way of thinking but basically and actually and fundamentally there is no difference between the two.

IS TERROR THE ONLY WAY ?

I still maintain that it is not love , compassion , humanism or brotherly sentiments that will save mankind. No , not at all . It is the sheer terror of extinction that can save us , if anything can. Each cell of a living organism cooperates with the cell next to it. It does not need any sentiment or declaration of undying love to do so. Each cell is wise enough to know that if its neighbour goes , it also goes. The cells stick together not out of brotherhood love and that kind of thing , but out of the urgent drive to survive. It is the same with us , but only on a larger scale. Soon we will all come to know one simple thing; if I try to destroy you , I will also be destroyed. We have arrived at a point where we cannot destroy your adversary without destroying yourself. So it is that kind of terror, and not the love and brotherhood that have been preached for centuries, that will help us to live together. But this has to percolate to the level of human consciousness. Until this percolates to the level of human consciousness , in the sense that man sees that he cannot destroy his neighbour without destroying himself , I don’t think it will help. I am sure that we have to come to that point. Whenever and wherever you have an edge over your adversary or your neighbour , you will still continue to exercise what you have been holding on to for centuries. So how are you going to solve the problem ? All utopias have failed. Human nature is basically violent. Because thought is violent. Anything that is born out of thought is destructive. You may cover it up with all wonderful and romantic phrases: ‘ love thy neighbour as thyself ‘. Don’t forget that in the name of ‘ Love thy neighbour as thyself’ millions and millions of people have died, more than in all the recent wars put together. But we now have to come to a point where we can realise that violence is not the answer that it is not the way to solve human problems. So , terror seems to be the only way. I am not talking of terrorists blowing up churches , temples and all that kind of thing , but the terror that if you try to destroy your neighbour you will possibly destroy yourself. That realisation has to come down to the level of the common man.

WHAT ABOUT THE SCIENCES ?

Science is as much a menace to mankind as any other system of thought. We have no doubt reaped immense benefit from the discoveries of science which has resulted in hi-tech and technology. But can you get away from this fact that it’s benefits have not percolated down to the common man ? Science is as much an aberrant as religion is. Unfortunately it has become a handmaiden of the state and tool in the hands of the leaders of mankind. Genetic engineering that the scientists are indulging in is not for the benefit of mankind. If they succeed, it will be handed over to the state. The state will use it to control everything and everyone. Brainwashing , which takes centuries , would be obsolete. Through a simple injection of genetically engineered substances into the body , the state can it’s citizens into bloodthirsty soldiers , mindless bureaucrats or whatever type it wants. Pure science is nothing but speculation. The scientists discuss formulas endlessly and provide us with some questions. But I am not at all taken in by the ‘ march of progress ‘ and all that rot. In the U S it was taking eighteen hours for a trip of journey from one place to another, then twelve, and then six hours and even more recently three hours and so on. And if supersonic jets are put to commercial use we may be able to make the trip in ona-and-a-half hours. All right that’s progress. But the same technology that makes fast international travel possible is making ever more deadly military fighter planes. How many of these planes are we using for faster and more comfortable travel from one point to another ? And how many more hundreds of planes are we using to destroy life and property ? You call this progress ? I don’t know. As the comforts increase , we come to depend upon them , and are loath to give up anything we have. Gimmicks like yoga and meditation will only help you to escape into that feeling of wellness. It is one of those hypes you fall for , more so if they are sold in the name of science. How much of science is there in their claims is anybody’s guess. Everything that has the stamp of science turns you into a fanatic and a health food junkie. It used to be three out of four. Now it is, ‘ nine out of ten doctors recommend. ..’ you can be sure that whatever they recommend are the very things that will destroy your health. Doctors need to be educated and you will be better off listening to the tenth one. When you have Lost faith in everything health becomes an obsession. Nutritional wisdom cannot stop the ageing process. One day through genetic engineering the process of ageing can be delayed; but it cannot be stopped. You may feel well and look more attractive. There is no such thing as fountain of youth. War against ageing is a lost battle.

ANGER IS ENERGY

You never look at the problem. What is the problem ? Anger, for example , I don’t want to discuss those silly things which these people have been discussing for centuries. Anger. Where is that anger ? Can you separate the anger from the functioning of this body ? It is like a wave in the ocean. Can you separate the waves from the ocean ? You can sit there and wait until the waves subside, so that you can have a swim in the ocean, like king Canute who sat there for years and years hoping that those waves in the ocean would disappear so that he could have a awim in a calm ocean. That will never happen . You can sit there and learn all about how these waves , the high tide and the low tide ( the scientists have given us all kinds of explanations). but the knowledge about that is not going to be of any help to you. You are not dealing with anger at all. Where do you feel the anger , first of all ? Wher do you feel all these so- called problems you want to be free from ? ….. the desires ? The burning desires. The desire burns you . Hunger burns you . So , the solutions you have or the means of fulfilling them ( desre and hunger ) are very simple and makes it impossible for that to burn itself out in your system . Where do you feel the fear ? You feel it here in the pit of your stomach. It is part of the body . The body cannot take those high and low tides of energy that is there in your body . So, you are wanting to suppress it for some spiritual or social reasons . You are not going to succeed . Anger is energy , a tremendous outburst of energy . And by destroying that energy through any means , you are destroying the very expression of life itself . It becomes a problem when you try to do something with that energy . What is absorbed by the system , you will not do the things that you think you will do if the anger is left alone. You are actually not dealing with the anger, but the frustration . Or to avoid such a situation which has resulted in clumsiness in your relationships or in your understanding of yourself . You want to be prepared to meet such situations as and when they arise in the future. The instrument which you are using has been used by you every time there is an outburst of anger . Yet you have not succeeded in freeing yourself from anger. You won’t come into the position of anything extraordinary , other than this instrument which you have been using all these years , and at the same time you hope that somehow this very thing will help you to be fee from the anger tomorrow . It is the same hope. You are not dealing with anger. You will never deal with this anger at all as long as you are interested in finding out a way of not hitting the person who is coming with a knife . You have to protect yourself, that is essential . I am not saying for a moment that your anger makes it impossible for you to deal with the situation . Don’t say that it’s non- violence or you should not hurt somebody else. He is hurting you. Even in the Bible, it is an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth . You never practise that . Of course they practise it on a larger scale , but in daily life they say it is something terrible to do . I don’t see any problem with that at all. What is the problem ?

There is no point in discussing those hypothetical situations for the simple reason that the person who is hopping mad with anger , burning with anger , will not seek and discuss the question of anger. That is amazing. That’s the time to deal with those things, when you are really burning with anger, burning with desire, burning with all those things that you want to be free from. Otherwise, it becomes a classroom discussion. Somebody talking on anatomy of anger, the anatomy of how the anger arises, or the anatomy of love. It’s too ridiculous . Or they offer solutions which don’t work when there is a real situation . There’s no problem for the individual . When he’s mad with anger that’s the time for him to deal with it. It stops the thinking. There is no way of separating yourself from the problem. That’s what you are trying to do. That is what I mean by saying that you are putting anger out there and trying to look and deal with it as if it is an object outside of you. When you separate yourself, the only result is that exactly what you fear would happen. That is inevitable. So you have no way of controlling that at all. Is there anything that you can do to prevent this separation from what you are? It is a horrible thing to realise that you are yourself anger and whatever you do to stop that, prevent it, or do something about it, is false. That (preventing) will be tomorrow or in your next life— not now. So that is what you are. You are not a spiritual man or religious man. You can imagine that you are a religious man because you are trying to control your anger, or trying to be free from anger or trying to be less and less angry as the years go by. All that makes you feel that you are not that vicious man whom you avoid. You are no different. You are not any more spiritual than the people whom you condemn. Tomorrow you are going to be a marvellous person, you will be free from anger. What do you want me to do in the meantime? Admire you? Because you have put on the label that you are a spiritual man or that you have put on fancy robes? What do you want me to do? For that you want me to admire you? There is nothing there to be admired because you are as vicious as anybody else in this world. If you condemn that..? Condemning that has no meaning. Adopting a posture which is totally unrelated to what is happening there has no meaning either. So, how can you put on this postureor adopt some kind of an attitude and feel superior to the animals. The animals are better than the humans. If there is anger; it (the animal) acts and that(killing) is only for the purpose of survival. If you kill your fellowman for feeding youself that is a moral act—only for that purpose, because if you look around, one form of life lives on another form of life. And if you talk of vegetarianism and kill millions of people, that is most immoral, unpardonable act that a civilised culture of human beings can ever do . Do you see the absurdity of the two.? You condemn this( killing) . And you love the animals. What for ?.

SUFFERING IS THE FOUNDATION OF RELIGION

Suffering is the foundation on which the whole Christian religion is based…….Suffering as a means to reach your goal. What you are left with is only the suffering, and you make a great big thing out of suffering, and yet you are not anywhere near the goal , whatever is the nature of your goal…. so you suffer in the hope of getting a permanent seat there in heaven– non- existent heaven . You are going through hell now in the hope of reaching heaven after your death . What for ? You suffer. All religions emphasise that, Bear the pain, the endurance of pain is the means. You go through hell in the hope of having paradise at the end of your life, or the end of a series of lives if you want to believe that . I am just pointing out the absurdity of talking about these things . The religious(teaching) has no meaning when you are pushed into a corner. Then you will behave exactly like anybody else . So this culture, your values, religious or otherwise, haven’t touched a bit there. The search for moksha (liberation) is the Dukkha(suffering) of all dukkhas. There’s no end to that you will keep searching for this eternally– you are not going to get it. The mind is a disease . Any medicine you try is only going to prolong the suffering. It’s only effect is to keep the disease going a little longer. The death of the mind will free you from suffering at once. But you do not want to die. Actually, you seem to enjoy the suffering and that is why you continue looking for some more medicines which will give you relief . Of course, the doctors and medicine makers have to make a living and will take full advantage of your hopeless situation. It is not that I am different to the suffering of man . I suffer seeing others suffer I am happy with the happy man . You seem to get pleasure out of the suffering of somebody . But why don’t you get the same pleasure when you see a rich man throwing his weight around ? They are the same . This you call pleasure and that you call jealously or envy. But I don’t see any difference between the two. I see suffering. Individually there isn’t anything that I can do . And at the same time I don’t want to use this(suffering) for my self- aggrandisement, my self- fulfilment. The problem is there, and we are individually responsible for it .yet we don’t want to accept the responsibility for creating the problems. The problems are not created by nature . It is we who have created the problems. There is plenty, there is bounty , in nature; but we take away what rightfully belongs to everybody and then say that you should give charity. That’s too absurd !

WHY ARE YOU SO AFRAID OF DEATH ?

What you call ‘yourself’ is fear . The ‘you ‘ is born out of fear ; it lives in fear functions in fear and dies in fear…..It is fear that makes you believe that you are living and that you will be dead. What we do not want is the fear to come to an end. That is why we have invented all these new minds, new sciences, new talks , therapies, choiceless awareness and various other gimmicks. When there is an actual physical danger , the danger of extinction of your physical body( which you think is yours) , everything that it has as it’s resource gets thrown into that situation and the body tries to survive in that particular moment . Have you ever noticed that when there is a real physical danger your thinking mechanism is never there to help you ?Never there . So you can plan ahead for every possible situation and be prepared to meet every kind of situation in your life , but actually when there is a physical danger, all your planning and all that you have thought about to be prepared to meet every kind of danger and every kind of situation is just not there. The body has to fall back on its own resources . If for some reason it cannot renew itself and survive in that particular situation, it goes merrily and gracefully. It knows that nothing is lost. The balance of energy has to be maintained in nature for some reason . I don’t know why . So death occurs only when there is a need for the atoms to maintain the balance of energy in the universe . It is nothing but a reshuffling of atoms. This organism has no way of finding out that it was born at a particular point of time and is going to die at point of time, and also that it is living at this moment and not dead. You shall not taste of death, for there is no death for you: you cannot experiance your own death . Are you born? Are you born? Life and Death cannot be separated you have no chance of whatever of knowing for yourself where one begins and the other ends . You can experiance the death of another , but not your own. The only death is physical death; there is no psychological death . Your experience structure cannot conceive of any event that it will not experiance . It even expects to preside over its own dissolution, and so it wonders what death will feel like– it tries to project the feeling of what it will be like not to feel. But in order to anticipate a future experiance, your structure needs knowledge, a similar past experiance it can call upon for reference. You cannot remember what it felt like not to exist before you were born, and you cannot remember your own birth, so you have no basis for projecting your future non- existence. As long as you have known life, you have known yourself, you have been there, so, to you, you have a feeling of eternity. To justify this feeling of eternity, your structure begins to convince itself that there will be a life after death for you– heaven, reincarnation, transmigration of souls or whatever. What is it that you think reincarnates ? Where is the soul of yours? Can you taste it , touch it, show it to me ? What is there inside of you that goes to heaven ? What is there? There is nothing inside of you but fear. Creation and destruction are going on simultaneously. The birth and death of thought happen simultaneously. That is why I insist that there is no such thing as death at all. Even the body does not die. It can change form but not cease altogether. Because death really does not exist it is impossible for you to experiance it. What you do experience is the void or emptiness you feel upon the disappearance of someone’s body. Death can never be experienced and neither can birth for that matter. The body knows that it is immortal. I very deliberately use the word immortal because nothing there comes to an end. When what you call clinical death takes place, the body breaks itself into its constituent elements. That’s all that happens. It may not constitute again and create the same body, which you think is yours, but when it breaks itself into its constituent elements, it provides the basis for the continuity of life. It may not be of any consolation to the individual who is dying, but this body becomes food for the millions and millions of bacteria. So, even assuming for a moment that you resort to cremation , as they do in some countries, wherever you dump the ashes, the carbon which is the end result of the burned body, provides the basis for some tiny little flower coming out of the earth. So, nothing here is lost.

IS THERE ANYTHING TO VEGETARIANISM ?

If you talk of vegetarianism and kill millions of people, that is the most immoral, unpardonable act that a civilised culture of human beings can ever do. Do you see the absurdity of the two?. Vegetarianism for what? For some spiritual goals? One form of life lives off another. That’s a fact, whether you like it or not. He (the questioner) says his cat is a vegetarian cat, it doesn’t kill a fly. Because of its association with vegetarians it has become vegetarian. For health reasons may be one should. I don’t know, I don’t see any adequate reason why one should be a vegetarian. Your body is not going to be any more pure than the meat eating body. in India those that have been vegetarians, they are not kind, they are not peaceful. You will be surprised. Vegetarians can be more aggressive than the meat eaters. Read the history of India– it is full of bloodshed, massacres and assassinations–all in the name of religion. So it has nothing to do with spirutuality–what you put in there (stomach) is not really the problem. You feel good because you have given up meat – eating. But what’s the difference ? Why do have to feel so good because you have given up meat – eating?. That may be psychological, if I could use that word. If you want to go back to eating meat, it is a different story. If there is a craving it creates a problem. If there is no craving what’s the difference whether you eat meat or vegetables?. One form of life lives on another form of life. How many millions of bacteria are crawling all over your body- the flora and the fauna ? You will be surprised, if they are magnified. They are as big as cockroaches. They live on you. When it becomes a corpse they will have a field day on this body. You want to eat macrobiotic food and someone else wants to eat something else. These commercials sell you all kinds of things. Why should we feed the body ? The body needs some energy and that energy you can have from anything you eat. Sawdust is enough for it, without the health food and vitamin C , or your brown rice and seaweed. You can believe whatever you want to believe. Someone else believes something else. It is the belief that matters to people. You replace one belief with another. You eat ideas. You put ideas into stomach . You can eat good ideas. Good luck to you . The moment you ask ‘How to live’ and ‘What to eat’ you have created a problem. …. Everything is cultural. All your tastes are cultivated tastes. The body does not know what you are eating. The problem is you eat more than what the body needs. It’s the overeating that is the problem. You eat for pleasure. Eating has become a pleasure- seeking movement for us As far as I am concerned there is no difference between looking for varieties of food or looking for varieties of girls (or men, as the case may be).

WHAT IS LIFE ?

You will never know what life is. Nobody can say anything about life. You can give definitions, but those definitions have no meaning. You can theorize about life, but that is a thing which is not of any value to you– it cannot help you to understand anything. So you don’t ask questions like’ what is life’ you know . ‘What is life’— there is no answer to that question, so the question cannot stay there any longer. You really don’t know, so the question disappears. You don’t let that happen there, because you think there must be an answer. If you don’t know the answer, you think there may be somebody in this world who can give answer to that question. ‘What is life’? — nobody can give an answer to that question– we really don’t know. So the question cannot stay there; the question burns itself out you see. The question is born out of thought, so when it burns itself out, what is there is energy. There’s a combustion: thought burns itself out and gives physical energy. In the same way, when the question is burnt, along with it goes the questioner also. The question and the questioner are not two different things. When the question burns itself out, what is there is energy. You can’t say anything about that energy–it is already manifesting itself, expressing itself in a boundless way; it has no limitations, no boundaries. It is not yours, not mine; it belongs to everybody. You are part of that. You are an expression of that. Just as the flower is an expression of life, you are another expression of life. Life is one unitary movement not two different movements. It’s moving, it’s a continuous flux, but you cannot look at that flux and say ‘That is a flux’…. This is just a pure and simple physiological functioning of the organism. Because there is life, there is a response. The response and the stimulus are not two different movements: you cannot separate the response from stimulus. (The moment you separate the response from the stimulus, there is a division, it is a divisive consciousness that is in operation. ) so, it is one movement.

LIFE IS LIKE A GREAT BIG DREAM

In a way the whole of life is like a big dream. I am looking at you but I really don’t know anything about you. There is a dream, a dream world. There is no reality to it at all. When the experiencing structure is not manipulating consciousness or whatever you want to call it, the whole of life is a great big dream from the experiential point of view; not from this point of view here but from your point of view. You see, you give reality to things–not oly to objects but also to feelings and experiences–and think that they are real. When you don’t translate them in terms of your accumulated knowledge, they are not things. You really don’t know what they are. To yo, in relation to the reality you give to things, you would call this state of not knowing a dream.

THER ARE ONLY ANSWERS, NO QUESTIONS

Try and formulate a question which you can call your own. This you will discover: they are not your questions at all. Questions are there because you already have a vague answer for the question. Thought, as memory and knowledge has created this mechanism. The only way it can perpetuate itself is to gather knowledge, to know more and more, to ask more, and more questions. As long as you are seeking you will be asking questions, and the questioning mechanism only adds more momentem to the naming process. ……

THE REAL PROBLEM IS THE SOLUTION

The real problem is the solution. Your problems continue because of the false solutions you have invented. If the answers are not there, the questions cannot be there. They are interdependent; your problems and solutions go together. Because you want to use certain answers to end your problems, those problems continue. The numerous solutions offered by all these holy people, the psychologists, the politicians, are not really solutions at all. That is obvious. They can only exhort you to try harder, practice more meditations, cultivate humility, stand on your head and more and more of the same. That is all they can do. If brushed aside your hope, fear and naivete, and treated these fellows like businessmen, you would see that they do not deliver the goods, and never will. But you go on and on buying these bogus wares offered up by the experts. Actually there are no problems, there are only solutions. But we don’t even have the guts to say that they don’t work. Even if you have discovered that they don’t work, sentimentality comes into the picture. The feeling’That man in whom I have placed my confidence and belief cannot con himself and con everyone else’ comes in the way of throwing the whole thing out of the window, down the drain. The solutions ate still a problem. Actually there is no problem there. The only problem is to find out the inadequacy or uselessness of all the solutions that have been offered to us. The questions naturally are born out of the assumptions and answers that we have taken for granted as real answers. But we really don’t want any answers for the questions, because an answer to the questions is the end of the answers. If one answer ends, all the other answers also go .

HEALTH , DISEASE AND PAIN

I think what we are actually doing is trying to treat the symptoms of what we call a disease. But my question is ‘ what is health ? ‘ what is disease ? Is ther any such thing as disease for this body ? The body does not know that it is healthy or unhealthy. You know, we translate the ‘malfunctioning’ (of the body) to mean that there is some imbalance in the natural rythm of the body. Not that we know what actually is the rythm of the body. But we are so frightened that we run to a doctor or to somebody who we think is in the know of things and can help us. We do not give a chance for the body to work out the problems created by the situation we find ourselves in. We do not give enough time for the body. But what actually is health ? Does the body know, or does it have any way of knowing, that it is healthy or unhealthy? And what is pain ? I am not asking a metaphysical question. To me pain is a healing process. But we do not give enough chance or opportunity to the body to heal itself or help itself, to free from what we call pain. We are frightened. We are afraid that something terrible will happen to us and run to a doctor to get rid of pain. That is what all these commercials ate taking advantage of .They are exploiting the gullibility and credulity of people. It is not that I am saying that you should not go to a doctor or take the help of medicine. I am not of those who believe that your prayers will help the body to recover from whatever disease it has, or that God is going to be the healer. Nothing like that. Pain is part of the biological functioning of the body, and that is all there is to it. And we have to rely or depend upon the chemistry of this body and the body always gives us a warning. In the early stages we do not pay any attention but when it becomes too much for the body to handle, there is panic and fear. Maybe it is necessary for us to go to a person who is in the know of affairs and get a helping hand from him. That’s all we can do. The patient can be given a helping hand. All treatment, whether traditional or alternative is based upon the account of the symptoms narrated by the patient.

WHAT IS MAYA ?

The sanskrit word ‘maya ‘ does not mean illusion in the same sense in which the English word is used. ‘Maya’ means to measure. You cannot measure anything unless you have a point. So, if the centre is absent, there is no circumference at all. That is pure and simple basic arithmetic. ..So, in that sense, anything you experience based on knowledge is an illusion. You are not separate from that illusion. You are the illusion. If one illusion goes it is always replaced with another illusion. Why? Because the ending of the illusion is the ending of ‘you ‘. That is death. The ending of belief is the ending of ‘you’ that is there. So, that is not the poetic, romantic death—of ‘ dying to your yesterdays ‘ . Physical death is the only way through which you flush out what your whole culture has put in there. Every time a thought is born, you are born. When the thought is gone, you are gone. But the YOU does not let the thought go and what gives continuity to this YOU is the thinking. Actually, there is no permanent entity in you, no totality of all your thoughts and experiences. You think that there is somebody who is thinking your thoughts., somebody who is feeling your feelings. That’s the illusion. I can say it is an illusion but it is not a illusion to you. Whenever a thought takes its birth there, you have created an entity or a point, and in reference to that point you are experiencing things. So, when the thought is not there, is it possible for you to experience anything or relate anything to a non-existing thing here? Every time a thought is born you are born. Thought in its very nature, is shortlived, and once it is gone, that’s the end of it. That is probably what the traditions meant by rebirth– death and birth and death and birth. It is not that this particular entity, which is non-existing even while you are living, takes a series of births. The ending of births and deaths is the state that they are talking about. But that state cannot be described in terms of bliss, beatitude, love, compassion and all that poetic nonsense and romantic stuff, because you have no way of experiencing what is there between these two thoughts. The world you experience around you is from a point of view. There must be a point and it is this point that creates the space. If this point is not there, there is no space. SO, anything you experience from this point is an illusion. Not that the world is an illusion. All the Vedanta philosophers in India, particularly the students of Sankara, indulge in such frivolous, absolute nonsense. The world is not an illusion, but anything you experience in relationships to this point which itself is illusory, is bound to be an illusion, that’s all. This point has no continuity. It comes into being in response to the demands of the situation. The demands of the situation create this point. The subject does not exist there. It is the object that creates the subject. This runs counter to the whole philosophical thinking of India. THE subject comes and goes and comes and goes in response to the things that are happening there. It is the object that creates the subject and not the subject that creates the object. This is a simple physiological phenomenon which can be tested. For example if there is no object there, there is no subject here. WHAT CREATES THE SUBJECT IS THE OBJECT. There is light. If the light is not there you have no way of looking at anything. The light falls on that object and the reflection of that light activates the optic nerves which in turn activate the memory cells. When the memory cells are activated all the knowledge you have about that object comes into operation. It is that process which is happening there that has created the subject. And the subject is the knowledge you have about it. The word ‘microphone’ is the eye. There is nothing there other than the WORD microphone. When you reduce it to that you feel the absurdity of talking about the self. The lower self, the higher self, and self-knowing,self – knowledge, knowing from moment to moment, is absolute rubbish,. You can indulge in such absolute nonsense and build up philosophical theories, but there is no subject there at all at any time There is no subject creating the object.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS ABSOLUTE

It is thought and thought alone that has created the absolute. Absolute zero, absolute power, absolute perfection, these have been invented by the holy men and experts. They kidded themselves and others. Down the centuries, the saints, saviours and prophets of mankind have kidded themselves and everybody else. Perfection and absolutes are false. You are trying to imitate and relate your behaviour according to these absolutes and it is falsifying you. You are actually functioning in an entirely different way. You are brutal. You feel you must be peaceful. It is contradictory. That’s all I am pointing out. When once you are freed from the pairs of opposites— right and wrong, good and bad — you will never be wrong. But until then the problem will be there. Thought has also invented the opposite of time, the now, the eternal now. The present exists only as an idea. The moment you attempt to look at the present it has already been brought into the framework of the past. Thought will use any trick under the sun to give momentem to its own continuity. It’s essential technique is to repeat the same thing over and over again. This gives an illusion of permanency. This permanency is shattered the moment the falseness of the past – present – future continuum is seen. The future can be nothing but the modified continuity of the past.

WHAT IS MORALITY ?

What is morality? It is not the fallowing of enjoined rules of conduct. It is not a question of standing above temptations, or of conquering hate, anger, greed, lust and violance. Questioning your actions before and after creates the moral problem. What is responsible for this situation is the faculty of distinguishing between right and wrong and influencing ur actions accordingly. Life is action. Unquestioned action is morality. Questioning ur actions is destroying the expression of life. A person who lets life act in its own way without the protective movement of thought has no self to defend. What need will he have to lie or cheat or pretend or to commit any other act which his society considers immoral? By morality I mean questioning your actions before and after. It is all social. For the smooth running of society these codes are necessary. These religious people have created a policeman inside you. Certain actions are termed good and certain other actions are termed bad either before or after uou do them. That hasn’t helped you anyway. It is thinking that has created the problem. Man’s problem is basically the moral dilemma– questioning your actions before and after. It has become a neurological problem, not a religious problem. Even God is a neurological problem. God is the jumbled spelling of dog but the whole of being is reacting to the word God. All your beliefs, they are just not psychological, they are neurological. You don’t know what is good. You know only what is good for you. That’s all you are interested in. Everything centres around that; all your art and reason centres around that. I am not being cynical. That’s a fact, nothing wrong with it. I am not saying anything against it. The situations change but it is that which is guiding you through all situations. I am not saying it is wrong, you see. If it is not so something must be wrong with you. As long as you are operating in the field of what they call the pair of opposites, good and bad, you will always be choosy in every situation. That is all, you cannot help that.

ARTISTS, POETS AND MUSICIANS

There is no such thing as an artist at all. He is just a technician. He or she has learned the technique of painting. They are just technicians, artsans , like the carpenters , masons etc. Why do you want to place art on a higher level than craft ? If there is no market for an artist’s creation, he will be out of business. It is the market that is responsible for all these so -called artistic beliefs. An artist is a craftsman like any other craftsman. He uses that tool to express himself. All human creation is born out of sensuality. I have nothing against sensuality. All art is a pleasure movement. Even that(pleasure) has to be cultivated by you. Otherwise you have no way of appreciating the beauty and art that artists are talking about. If you question their creation, they feel superior, thinking that you don’t have taste . Then they want you to go to a school to learn how to appreciate their art . If you don’t enjoy a poem written by a so-called great poet, they forcibly educate you to appreciate poetry. That is all that they are doing in the educational institutions. They teach us how to appreciate music, how to appreciate painting and beauty and so on. Meanwhile they make a living off you. Artists find it comforting to think that they are creative; ‘creative art’ ‘creative ideas’ ‘creative politics’ . It’s nonsense. There is nothing really creative in them in the sense of their doing anything original, new or free. Artists pick something here and something there, put it together and think they have created something marvellous. They are all imitating something that is already there. Imitation and style are the only ‘creativity’ we have. Each of us has our own style according to the school we attended, the language we were taught, the books we have read, the examinations we have taken. And within that framework again we have our own style. Perfecting style and technique is all that operates there. You will be surprised that one of these days computers will paint and create music much better than all the painters and musicians that the world has produced so far. It may not happen in our lifetime but it will happen . You are no different from a computer. We are not ready to accept that because we are made to believe that we are not just machines- that there is something more to us. You have to come to terms with this and accept that we are machines. The human intellect that we have developed through education, through all kinds of techniques is no match for nature. They(creative activities) assume importance because they have been recognised as expression of spiritual, artistic and intellectual values. The drive for self expression is born out of neurosis. This applies to the spiritual teachers of mankind too. There is no such thing as a direct sense experience. All forms of art are nothing but an expression of sensuality .

MENTALLY DIFFERENT PEOPLE

A top neuro surgeon from All India Institute of Mental health of Bangalore is put to a question ‘ who is normal? Who is sane and who is insane ‘? He said ‘statistically speaking, we are sane’. Ok that was quite satisfactory. When asked him ‘ why are you putting all of them there and treating them? How much help do you give them ?. He said, ‘Not even two per cent of them are helped. We send them back to their homes but they keep returning’. ‘Then why are you running this show’ when asked. He said, ‘The government pays the money and the families don’t want to keep those people in their homes ‘. So, we now move on from there to the basic question, ‘Who is sane and who is insane?’. When once you are freed from— are not trapped in the duality of right and wrong, good and bad, you can never do anything bad. As long as you are caught up in wanting to do only good, you will always do bad. Because the ‘good’ you seek is only in the future. You will be good some other time and until then you remain a bad person. So , the so– called insane have given up and we are doing them the greatest harm and disservice by pushing them to fit themselves into this framework of ours which is rotten.

MATERIAL AND SPIRITUAL GOALS – ARE THEY DIFFERENT ?

There is no such thing as spirutuality at all. If you superimpose what you call spirutuality on what is called material life, you create problems for yourself. Because you see growth and development in the material world around you, you are applying that to this so-called spirutual life also. There is only one life. ….This is a material life, and that other has no relevance. Wanting to change your material life into that so-called religious pattern given to you , placed before you by these religious people, is destroying the possibility of your living in harmony and accepting the reality of this material world exactly the way it is . That is responsible for your pain, for your suffering, for your sarrow. All civilizations all cultures, place before you a goal, whether material or spiritual. There are ways and means of achieving your material goals but even in this respect there is a lot of pain, there is a lot of suffering. And you have superimposed on that what is called a spiritual goal. Christianity, for example is built on the foundation of suffering as a means to reach your goal. What we are left with is only the suffering and you make a great big thing out of suffering. And yet, you are not anywhere near the goal, whatever is the nature of your goal whereas in the material world the goal is something tangible. The instrument which you are using to achieve your material goal does produce certain results. By using that more and more you can achieve the desired results but there is no guarantee. The instrument which you are using is limited in its scope. It is applicable only in this area. So the instrument which you are using to achieve your so-called spirutual goals is the same instrument. You do not realise that all the spiritual goals that are superimposed on your so-called material goals are born out of your fantasy because you have divided life into material and spiritual. It doesn’t matter what instrument you use to achieve your goal, whether it is material or spiritual it is exactly the same. The spiritual people are the most dishonest people. I am emphasising that foundation upon which the whole of spirutuality is built. If there is no spirit, the whole talk of spirutuality is bosh and nonsense. You can’t come into your own being until you are free from the whole thing surrounding the concept of self. To be really on your own, the whole basis of spirutual life, which is erroneous, has to be destroyed. It does not mean that you become fanatical or violent, burning down temples, tearing down the idols, destroying the holy books like a bunch of drunks. It is not that at all. It is a bonfire inside you. Everything that mankind has thought and experienced must go.

THE FUNDAMENTAL MISTAKE

The fundamental mistake that humanity made somewhere along the line was to experience this separateness from the totality of life. At that time there occurred in man, which includes woman also, this self-consciousness which separated him from the life around. He was so isolated that it . frightened him . The demand to be part of the totality of life around him created this tremendous demand for the ultimate. He thought that the spiritual goals of God, truth, reality would help him to become part of the ‘ whole ‘ again. But the very attempt on his part to become one with or become integrated with the totality of life has kept him only more separate. Isolated functioning is not part of nature. But this isolation has created a demand for finding out ways and means of becoming a part of nature. But thought in its very nature can only create problems and cannot help us solve them. We don’t seem to realise that it is thought that is separating us from the totality of things. The belief that this is the one that can help us to keep in tune with the totality is not going to materialise. So, it has come up with all kinds of ingenuous, if I may use the word, ideas of insight and intuition. When man first experienced the division in his consciousness, when he experienced his self-consciousness, he felt superior to other animals, which he is not, and therein sowed the seeds of his own destruction.

THE PSYCHIATRIST IS THE ENEMY OF THIS CULTURE

The brain is not a creator. This is a statement many people may not accept, but this is what I have found out. Thoughts come from outside. There are no individuals at all. It is culture, society, or whatever you want to call it, the has created all of us for the sole purpose of maintaining its status quo. At the same time, it has also created the idea that you must become something different from what you are. That is why you try to better yourself, improve yourself. You want to become something other than what you are. That creates this neurotic situation. The neurosis in the human species is absolutely essential. We have to maintain this neurosis in order to function in this society. There is no other way that we can function in this society except to live in hope and die in hope. There are some people who have given up. But we force them to become functional in this value system which we have created. We even push them to commit suicide lest they become manic – depressive individuals. We are solely responsible for driving all those people into a situation where they have to put an end to themselves. They don’t want to be functional here. They have given up. This is the reason why I say that the psychiatrist is the enemy of this culture,because he is forcing all those people who have given up fitting into this value system. One of the tragic things that human culture has done to us is that it has placed before us the model of a perfect being. That perfect being is modeled after the great spiritual teachers. The human being modelled after the great spiritual teachers has totally failed. The model has not touched anything there. Your value system is the one that is responsible for the human malady, the human tragedy, forcing everybody to fit into that model.

WHAT IS KEEPING YOU FROM BEING IN YOUR NATURAL STATE ?

What is keeping you from being in your natural state? You are constantly moving away from yourself. You want to be happy, either permanently or atleast for this moment. You are dissatisfied with your everyday experiences, and so you want some new ones. You want to perfect yourself, to change yourself. You are reaching out, trying to be something other than what you are. It is this that is taking you away from yourself. Society has put before you the ideal of a ‘perfect man’. No matter in which culture you were born, you have scriptural doctrines and traditions handed down to you to tell you how to behave. You are told that through due practice you can even eventually come into the state attained by the sages, saints and saviours of mankind. And so you try to control your behaviour, to control your thoughts, to be something unnatural. We are living in a thought sphere. Your thoughts are not your own; they belong to everybody. There are only thoughts, but you create a counter- thought, the thinker, with which you read every thought. Your effort to control has created a secondary moment of thought whithin you, which you call the ‘I’. This movement of thought within you is parallel to the movement of life, but isolated from it; it can never touch life. You are a living creature, yet you lead your entire life within the realm of this isolated, parallel movement of thought. You cut yourself off from life– that is something very unnatural. Have you ever looked at that parallel movement of thought? The books on English grammar will tell you that ‘I’ is a first person singular pronoun, subjective case; but that is not what you want to know. Can you look at that thing you call ‘I’? It is very elusive. Look at it now, feel it, touch it, and tell me. How do you look at it? And what is the thing that is looking at what you call ‘I’? This is the crux of the whole problem: the one that is looking at what you call ‘I’ is the ‘I’. It is creating an illusory division of itself into subject and object, and through this division it is continuing. This is the divisive nature that is operating in you, in your consciousness. Contnuity of its existence is all that interests it. As long as you want to understand that ‘you’or to change that ‘you’ into something spiritual, into something holy, beautiful or marvellous, that ‘you ‘ will continue. If you do not want to do anything about it, it is not there, it’s gone. How do you understand this? I have for all practical purposes made a statement: ‘ what you are looking at is not different from the one who is looking ‘ what do you do with a statement like this? What instrument do you have at your disposal for understanding a meaningless, illogical, irrational statement? You begin to think. Through thinking, you cannot understand a thing. You are translating what I am saying. What I am saying in terms of the knowledge you already have, just as you translate everything else, because you want to get something out of it. When you stop doing that, what is there is what I am describing. The absence of what you are doing–trying to understand, or trying to change yourself– is the state of being that I am describing.

SPEAKING TO YOURSELF CONSTANTLY IS YOUR PROBLEM

You must always recognise what you are looking at, otherwise you are not there. The moment you translate, the YOU is there. You look at something and recognise that it is a bag, a red bag. Thought interferes with the sensation by translating. Why does thought interfere ? And can you do anything about it? The moment you look at a thing, what comes inside of you is the word ‘ bag’ , if not’bag’, then ‘bench’ or ‘bannister’, ‘step’, that man sitting there, he has white hair, . It goes on and on–you are repeating to yourself all the time. If you don’t do that you are preoccupied with something else: ‘ I am getting late for the office’, you are either thinking about something which is totally unrelated to the way the senses are functuoning at this moment, or else you are looking and saying to yourself ‘that’s a bag , that’s a red bag’ and so on and so on–that is all that is there. The word ‘bag’ separates you from what you are looking at, thereby creating the you , otherwise there is no space between the two. Every time a thought is born, you are born. When the thought is gone, you are gone. But the YOU does not let the thought go, and what gives continuity to this YOU is the thinking. Actually there is no permanent entity in you, no totality of all your thoughts and experiences. You think that there is somebody who is thinking your thoughts, ‘somebody’ who is feeling your feelings–that’s the illusion. I can say it is an illusion but it is not an illusion to you. Your emotions are more complex, but it is the same process. Why do you have to tell yourself that you are angry, that you are envious of someone else, or that sex is bothering you? I am not saying anything about fulfilling or not fulfilling. There is a sensation in you, and you say that you are depressed or unhappy or blissful, jealous, greedy, envious. This labelling brings into existence the one who is translating this sensation. What you call ‘I’ is nothing but this word ‘red bag’, ‘bench’, ‘steps’ ‘light bulb’ ‘angry’ ‘blissful’ ‘jealous’ or whatever. You are putting your brain cells to unnecessary activity making the memory cells operate all the time, destroying the energy that is there. This is only wearing you out. This labelling is necessary when you must communicate with someone else or with yourself. But you communicate with yourself all the time. Why do you do this? The only difference between you and the person who talks aloud to himself is that you don’t talk aloud. The moment you begin to talk aloud, along comes the psychiatrist. That chap, of course, is doing the same thing that you are doing, communicating to himself all the time—‘bag’ ‘red bag’ ‘obsessive’ ‘compulsive’ ‘oediplus complex’ ‘greedy’ ‘bench ‘ ‘bannister’, ‘martini’. Then he says something is wrong with you and puts you on the couch and wants to change you, to help you. Why can’t you leave the sensations alone? Why do you translate? You do this because if you do not communicate to yourself, you are not there. The prospect of that is frightening to you.

YOU ARE UNIQUE

By using the models of Jesus, Buddha, or Krishna we have destroyed the possibility of nature throwing up unique individuals. Those who recommend that you forget your own natural uniqueness and be like someone else, no matter how saintly that person may be, is putting you on the wrong track. It is like the blind leading the blind. When dealing with these yogins and holy men the first wrong turn you take is in trying to relate the way they are functuoning with the way you are functuoning. What they are describing may not be related to the way you are functuoning at all. Uniqueness is not something which can be turned out in a factory. Society is only interested in the status quo and provided all these so-called special individuals so that you will have to fallow. You want to be like that fellow— the saint, the saviour, or the revolutionary– but it is an impossibility. Your society, which is only interested in turning out copies of acceptable models, is threatened by real individuality because it (individuality) threatens it’s continuity. A truly unique person, having no cultural reference point would never know that he is unique. What nature has created in the form of human species is something extraordinary. It is an unparalleled creation. But culture is interested in fitting the actions of all human beings into a common mould. That is because it is interested in maintaining the status quo, it’s value system. That is where the real conflict is. Man cannot become man so long as he fallows somebody. What is responsible for man remaining an animal is that culture– the top dog, fallowing somebody— that has not helped you at all. You want to be a cheap imitation of Sankara or Buddha; you don’t want to be yourself. What for ? I tell you, you are far more unique and extraordinary than all those saints and saviours of mankind put together. Why do you want to be a cheap imitation of that fellow? That is one of the myths. Forget it.

DISCOVER YOUR OWN PATH REJECTING ALL OTHERS……..

The path has to be yours. I don’t want to use the term path because it has mystcal overtones. …. you have to make it on your own. All the paths of others are to be rejected . Unless rejected you can’t find your path. What makes you unhappy is the search for a thing that does not exist. This is the unfortunate situation. You are not getting anywhere. That is not the way at all. Then what is the way? . There is no way. Anything I say you turn into a way and add to the momentum. That is not the way. That is not the path. It has to be yours. All paths must go. As long as you fallow somebody else’s path, the path is the product of thought. So, it is actually not a new path, it’s the same old path, and you are playing the same old game in a new way. It is not a new game. It is the same old game that you are playing all the time, but you think you are playing a new game. You have to come to a point where you can’t do anything at all.

NO POWER OUTSIDE OF YOU

Psychic powers, clairvoyance, clairaudience— they are all human instincts. And thay are necessary because there are two things that the human organism is interested in. One: it’s survival at any cost. Why should it survive ? I don’t know; it is a foolish question to ask. That is one of the most important things: it has a survival mechanism of its own, which is quite different from the survival mechanism of the movement of thought. The second thing is to reproduce itself. It has to reproduce. These are the two fundamental characteristics of the human organism, the living organism. I can tell you that there is no power outside of you — no power. This does not mean that you have all the attributes that you read about of the super-duper gods; but there is no power outside of you. If there is any power in this Universe, it is in you. It’s there in you. That’s what I mean by saying there’s no power outside of man. It is the same power, the same life, that is functioning there in you. Something is trying to express itself and the culture is pushing it down. When once it throws the culture out it expresses itself in its own way…… That is the fragrance of this flower. Such an individual cannot retire into a cave or hide himself. He has to live in the midst of the world. He has no place to go. That is the fragrance of this flower.

COURAGE ………

Man has to be saved from the saviours of mankind. The religious people— they kidded themselves and fooled the whole of mankind. Throw them out! That is courage itself, because of the courage there; not the courage you practise. Fearlessness is not freedom from all the phobias. The phobias are essential for the survival of the organism. You must have the fear of heights and the fear of depths— if that is not there, there is a danger of your falling. But you want to teach courage to man to fight on the battlefield. Why do you want to teach him courage? To kill others and get killed himself– that is your culture. Crossing the Atlantic in a balloon or the Pacific on a raft– anybody can do that– that is not courage. Fearlessness is not a silly thing like that. Courage is to brush aside everything that man has experienced and felt before you. You are the only one, greater than all those things. Everything is finished, the whole tradition is finished, however sacred and holy it may be– then only can you be yourself– that is individuality. For the first time you become an individual.

The quantum physicists tell us that it is all connected and we are all part of of the Universe………. But they have arrived at that as a concept. So did the metaphysicians in India. They arrived at that fact and said that there is no such thing as space. Space is a very essential thing for you to survive in this world. But the fact that there is such a thing as space can never be experienced by you. A scientist said that there is no such thing as space, there is no such thing as time, and there is no such thing as matter. He is just repeating a memorised statement. But can he give an equation to prove that there is no such thing as space ? But supposing it is a fact in your life that yhere is no space, what happens to your relationship with your wife.? When the phrases like that there is no observer, or that the observer is the observed — are used without realising the implications of what they are saying will end up with hard times. It is very interesting for the theologians, the metaphysicians, and the scientists to discuss these things. But when it percolates to the level of day-to-day existence, and of our relationship with the people around us, it is very different. If you tell yourself that the observer is the observed and apply that to a situation where you are about to make love to your wife, what will happen ?. That’s the end of all relationship, it’s finished. To say the observer is the observd is a meaningless statement, repeated ad nauseam. They actually do not know what will happen when that is the case. All relationships will be finished.

ARTISTS, POETS AND MUSICIANS

There is no such thing as an artist at all. He is just a technician. He or she has learned the technique of painting. They are just technicians, artsans , like the carpenters , masons etc. Why do you want to place art on a higher level than craft ? If there is no market for an artist’s creation, he will be out of business. It is the market that is responsible for all these so -called artistic beliefs. An artist is a craftsman like any other craftsman. He uses that tool to express himself. All human creation is born out of sensuality. I have nothing against sensuality. All art is a pleasure movement. Even that(pleasure) has to be cultivated by you. Otherwise you have no way of appreciating the beauty and art that artists are talking about. If you question their creation, they feel superior, thinking that you don’t have taste . Then they want you to go to a school to learn how to appreciate their art . If you don’t enjoy a poem written by a so-called great poet, they forcibly educate you to appreciate poetry. That is all that they are doing in the educational institutions. They teach us how to appreciate music, how to appreciate painting and beauty and so on. Meanwhile they make a living off you. Artists find it comforting to think that they are creative; ‘creative art’ ‘creative ideas’ ‘creative politics’ . It’s nonsense. There is nothing really creative in them in the sense of their doing anything original, new or free. Artists pick something here and something there, put it together and think they have created something marvellous. They are all imitating something that is already there. Imitation and style are the only ‘creativity’ we have. Each of us has our own style according to the school we attended, the language we were taught, the books we have read, the examinations we have taken. And within that framework again we have our own style. Perfecting style and technique is all that operates there. You will be surprised that one of these days computers will paint and create music much better than all the painters and musicians that the world has produced so far. It may not happen in our lifetime but it will happen . You are no different from a computer. We are not ready to accept that because we are made to believe that we are not just machines- that there is something more to us. You have to come to terms with this and accept that we are machines. The human intellect that we have developed through education, through all kinds of techniques is no match for nature. They(creative activities) assume importance because they have been recognised as expression of spiritual, artistic and intellectual values. The drive for self expression is born out of neurosis. This applies to the spiritual teachers of mankind too. There is no such thing as a direct sense experience. All forms of art are nothing but an expression of sensuality .

DOES THE BRAIN RECORD EVERY EXPERIENCE IN YOUR LIFE. ……….

THERE is no such thing as the totality of experiences. Memory is in frames. In order to explain what I mean when I say that it is all in frames and that the whole human body is functioning from moment to moment. I must point to one basic thing, that is how the senses are operating. What is there is only response to a stimulus. The response is not translated by anything that is there, except that it registers the stimuli in the same way as information is registered when transferring images from one floppy disc to another. There is no linking up of all these responses. Each one is an independent frame. A lot of imagination is involved in our trying to understand what is actually happening there. I give you the example of what a friend wanted me to do when I was in a hill resort. He said that when he reached the top of a particular mountain he would have a 360- degree view of the whole place. So he dragged me to the top. Unwillingly, I pushed myself to the top of that hill and tried to experience what he called a 360-degree view of the place. I said to myself, ‘ that fellow is kidding himself and imagining things. How is it possible to experience the 360-degree view of this place? I can see only 180 degrees. So what he thinks he is experiencing is born out of his own imagination’ . Translating the sensory perceptions into images is the cultural input there. When my eyes are not looking at you, there is no way that this organism can create the image of what you look like. The problem is in the creation of images which is born out of our imagination and mostly out of what is put in there by our culture. So, what I am trying to say is that what the brain does is to translate these sensory perceptions into the framework of memory. Memory is not a constant factor. What happens is that when the light falls on the object and activates your optic nerve, it throws an image on the retina. This is what we have learnt from the study of our biology, and that is what the physiologists have taught us in our schools. But actually if you want to experiance the fact, that is, the image of what you are looking at, it is something which cannot be experienced by you. Why I give this example is to free us from the many of the ideas we have of what memory is. When once the optic nerves are activated they in their turn activate the neurons in the brain, bring the memory into operation, and tell us that the object is this or that. So the next frame is quite different from the previous frame. Let me give you the example of a movie camera. The movie camera captures whatever is happening in frames. You take, for example, the movement of my hand from here to there— it has ten different frames to show that the hand has moved from here to there. And in order to see the movement on the screen you have to use an artificial thing called the projector. And only then do you see the movement of hand artificially created through the help of the projector. The sound is something like what they do in movie industry. The sound is ninteen-and-a-half frames behind the corresponding picture frame. There is a gap between the picture you take and the sound-ninteen-and-a-half frames. In exactly the same way, thought is very slow. By the time it comes and captures this ‘whatever is there’ within its framework, your eyes have moved somewhere else, and that other thing is completely wiped out. Just think of television. There the picture never really there. It is just a collection of dots. It required the brain to put the picture together. The brain is operating exactly the same way. The whole thing is registered as dots and the pictures ate taken in frames. There is an illusion that there is somebody who is looking at the things. Actually there is nobody who is looking at things. It may sound very strange to you when I say that there is nobody who is talking. You are the one who is making me talk when engaged in conversation, there is nobody here who is talking. There is nobody. It may sound very strange to you but that is the way it is. It is so mechanical, yet we are not ready to accept the mechanical functioning of this living organism.

We are using the neurons, our memory, constantly to maintain our identity, whether you are awake or asleep or dreaming, this process is carried on. But it is wearing you out. That is why I say that the tragedy that is facing mankind is not Aids or cancer but Alzheimer’s disease.

All our experiences, spirutial or otherwise, are the basic cause of our suffering. ……The body is not interested in anything that you are interested in. That is the battle that is going on all the time. . There seems to be no way out. ..

There are many people who talk of rebirthing. It has become fashionable for people to indulge in that kind of fantasy. You know in Japan they have some techniques in which by manipulating certain nerves at the base of your head they will make you go through the experience of your own birth. I have always maintained that the experiencing structure is totally absent at the time of our birth. And, always questioned the psychologists including Freud when he made a statement that birth is a traumatic experience, when that is not a traumatic experience at all because there is no experiencing structure there at all. Actually it is very difficult to say as to when the experiencing structure in babies comes into operation. I am one of those who believe that the influence of environment is very limited on us although I am not an authority on such things, but the experiencing structure is genetic in its origin and in its expression. Everything is genetically controlled. If we really want to change individuals, the only way we can do it is not by changing the environment, not through changing the cultural input, but by trying to understand what really is the part that genes play in us. May be through some kind of genetic engineering we can create perfect human beings. I am at the same time conscious of the fact that it is a very dangerous thing that we are indulging in. When once we perfect these engineering techniques, we will hand them over to the state. Thereafter it will be a lot easier for the state to manipulate individuals and turn them into mere robots.(I am not against robots as we are actually robots, whether we like it or not) . The state will make people do things, which they are unwilling to do. Usually it takes a lot of time and a lot of Brainwashing to teach something to people– to make people believe in God., to make people believe in a particular political ideology, conversely, to free them from some kind of belief we have to brainwash them all over again. It is a very elaborate and long process. But it is a lot easier and faster for us to use these techniques of genetic engineering to change individuals than it is possible otherwise.